What is "avalanche"

Avalanche \Av"a*lanche`\ (?; 277), n. [F. avalanche, fr. avaler to descend, to let down, from aval down, downward; ? (L. ad) + val, L. vallis, valley. See Valley.]

1. A large mass or body of snow and ice sliding swiftly down a mountain side, or falling down a precipice.

2. A fall of earth, rocks, etc., similar to that of an avalanche of snow or ice.

3. A sudden, great, or irresistible descent or influx of anything.

1763, from French avalanche (17c.), from Romansch (Swiss) avalantze "descent," altered (by metathesis of -l- and -v-, probably influenced by Old French avaler "to descend, go down") from Savoy dialect lavantse, from Provençal lavanca "avalanche," perhaps from a pre-Latin Alpine language (the suffix -anca suggests Ligurian). As a verb, from 1872.

n. 1 A large mass or body of snow and ice sliding swiftly down a mountain side, or falling down a precipice. 2 A fall of earth, rocks, etc., similar to that of an avalanche of snow or ice. 3 A sudden, great, or irresistible descent or influx of anything. 4 Anything like an avalanche in suddenness and overwhelming quantity (like a barrage, blitz, etc). vb. 1 (context intransitive English) To descend like an avalanche. 2 (context transitive English) To come down upon; to overwhelm.

1. n. a slide of large masses of snow and ice and mud down a mountain

2. a sudden appearance of an overwhelming number of things; "the program brought an avalanche of mail"

3. v. of snow masses in the mountains [syn: roll down]

An avalanche (also called a snowslide or snowslip) is a rapid flow of snow down a sloping surface. Avalanches are typically triggered in a starting zone from a mechanical failure in the snowpack (slab avalanche) when the forces on the snow exceed its strength but sometimes only with gradually widening (loose snow avalanche). After initiation, avalanches usually accelerate rapidly and grow in mass and volume as they entrain more snow. If the avalanche moves fast enough some of the snow may mix with the air forming a powder snow avalanche, which is a type of gravity current.

Slides of rocks or debris, behaving in a similar way to snow, are also referred to as avalanches (see rockslide). The remainder of this article refers to snow avalanches.

The load on the snowpack may be only due to gravity, in which case failure may result either from weakening in the snowpack or increased load due to precipitation. Avalanches that occur in this way are known as spontaneous avalanches. Avalanches can also be triggered by other loads such as skiers, snowmobilers, animals or explosives. Seismic activity may also trigger the failure in the snowpack and avalanches. A popular myth is that avalanches can be triggered by loud noise or shouting, but the pressure from sound is orders of magnitude too small to trigger an avalanche.

Although primarily composed of flowing snow and air, large avalanches have the capability to entrain ice, rocks, trees, and other material on the slope, and are distinct from mudslides, rock slides, and serac collapses on an icefall. Avalanches are not rare or random events and are endemic to any mountain range that accumulates a standing snowpack. Avalanches are most common during winter or spring but glacier movements may cause ice and snow avalanches at any time of year. In mountainous terrain, avalanches are among the most serious objective natural hazards to life and property, with their destructive capability resulting from their potential to carry enormous masses of snow at high speeds.

There is no universally accepted classification of avalanches—different classifications are useful for different purposes. Avalanches can be described by their size, their destructive potential, their initiation mechanism, their composition and their dynamics.

An avalanche is a cascade of snow down a slope (for rocks or debris see rockslide).

Avalanche may also refer to:

Avalanche is the third album by Some Velvet Sidewalk.

Avalanche is an arcade game released by Atari Inc. in 1978. The object is to catch falling rocks with a controllable set of paddles that diminish in number and size as the rocks fall faster and faster. The concept gained a much wider audience after Activision released an unauthorized adaptation in 1981 as Kaboom! for the Atari 2600.

Avalanche is the fifth album by English singer-songwriter Thea Gilmore. It was released on 9 September 2003 on the Hungry Dog record label. The album peaked at number 62 on the UK Albums Chart. Uncut magazine ranked Avalanche at number 59 of its "Albums of the Year" for 2003 and said of Gilmore: "you can here her growing in stature with every record she makes."

"Avalanche" is the fifth episode of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, a British 1960s Supermarionation television series co-created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. Written by Shane Rimmer and directed by Brian Burgess, it was first broadcast on 27 October 1967 on ATV Midlands. In this episode, the Mysterons kill and reconstruct a maintenance engineer to cripple the Frost Line Outer Space Defence System.

Avalanche (Dominikos Ioannis Petrakis) is a fictional character, a mutant supervillain appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character is usually depicted as an enemy of the X-Men.

A Cretan mutant, Avalanche possesses the ability to generate seismic waves from his hands that are strong enough to create earthquakes of varying sizes and to disintegrate any substance other than living tissue. He has been a member of the Brotherhood of Mutants and Freedom Force.

The animated series X-Men: Evolution portrays him as Lance Alvers, a misguided mutant teenager and one time romantic love interest of the X-Men's Shadowcat.

Avalanche is the first solo album by Canadian artist Matthew Good. Released in 2003, the album marked a creative departure from his earlier work with the Matthew Good Band, and featured accompaniment by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra on several tracks.

The album had three singles: " Weapon", " In a World Called Catastrophe" and "Near Fantastica", although "Near Fantastica" was released only to radio in a substantially shorter edit. The music video for " Weapon" won a Juno Award, which was shared between Good and co-director Ante Kovac (Good refused to accept the award, however, as he boycotts the Juno Awards).

Producer Warne Livesey, who previously worked with Good on the massively successful Beautiful Midnight, received a Juno Award nomination for his work on Avalanche.

An excerpt of "Weapon" was used as the opening credits theme music for CTV's series The Eleventh Hour.

Avalanche is the name of a proposed peer-to-peer (P2P) network created by Pablo Rodriguez and Christos Gkantsidis at Microsoft, which claims to offer improved scalability and bandwidth efficiency compared to existing P2P systems.

The proposed system works in a similar way to BitTorrent, but aims to improve some of its shortfalls. Like BitTorrent, Avalanche splits the file to be distributed into small blocks. However, rather than peers simply transmitting the blocks, they transmit random linear combinations of the blocks along with the random coefficients of this linear combination - a technique known as ' network coding'. This technique removes the need for each peer to have complex knowledge of block distribution across the network (an aspect of BitTorrent-like protocols which the paper claims does not scale very well).

Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, criticized the proposed Avalanche system in a post to his blog. He mentions inaccuracies in the paper's analysis of the BitTorrent protocol (some of it being based on a 4-years-out-of-date version of the protocol which used an algorithm that "sucks") and describes the paper as "garbage."

Microsoft in 2007 made the technology available as a public customer technology preview (CTP) of the resulting system, called 'Microsoft Secure Content Downloader' (MSCD), and since 2015 started delivering Windows Updates using peer-to-peer in Windows 10.

Avalanche (also known as Three) is a drinking game of chance which can be played with any number of players. Play passes counterclockwise around a circle. The current player adds some of his/her drink of an amount of his/her choosing to the "game glass." Adding only a little drink, especially to a fairly empty glass, is a small bet as this will be easy to drink if necessary. On the other hand, adding a large amount of drink, while risking a challenging "downing" task, also potentially inflicts that task on someone else.

Once the drink has been added to the glass, a six-sided die is thrown by the same player who added the drink. The results of each number are as follows:

1. No event, play passes to the next person.
2. The player doubles the amount of liquid in the glass or fills it, whichever is less. Play passes to the next person.
3. Current player must drink the glass.
4. Current player yells "Floor!" and all players must point downward. The last player to do so drinks the glass.
5. Roll again. If another 5 is rolled, then the roller has "Power Fives" and may make anyone drink the glass. Any other roll is treated as indicated.
6. No event, play passes to the next person.

(The odds are thus as follows: 7/18 no event, play passes; 7/36 liquid is doubled, play passes; 7/36 player must drink; 7/36 slowest player drinks; 1/36 the player can make anyone drink.)

After the event, the glass and die will be passed on to the next player, who thus may or may not inherit a partly full glass. When the game glass is drunk, play continues with another glass and with the next player from the one drinking the glass. If this player has not finished drinking the glass by the time play returns to them, they lose the game and are out. Once a player consumes 3 game glasses, they are out with a loss. The winner is the last person not to lose in these two manners. The ranks for the next game are the same as in the game Asshole (from "president" to "asshole"), except that staying in the game longer is beneficial in Avalanche.

The game is derived from the drinking games Arrogance and Asshole.

"Avalanche" is a song by Leonard Cohen. It appears on his third album, Songs of Love and Hate, released in 1971.

The lyrics are based on a poem he had previously written. He acknowledged in a 1992 interview with Paul Zollo that his "chop", his unique pattern of playing classical guitar, is behind many of his early songs, and this one features Cohen's trademark fast, syncopated classical guitar pattern as the accompaniment on the recording of the song.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds recorded a version of the song for their 1984 album From Her to Eternity.

Avalanche is a bobsled roller coaster at Kings Dominion in Doswell, Virginia, United States. Avalanche opened in 1988 and is the only Mack bobsled coaster running in the United States today. It is located in the Safari Village section of the amusement park. There are seven cars per train and the various cars are themed after Olympic bobsleds that represent five countries. The countries include France, the United States, Germany, Switzerland, and Canada. Each car has its country specific WInter Olympic decals.

Avalanche is a 1923 Austrian silent film directed by Michael Curtiz, and produced by Arnold Pressburger.

Avalanche is a Norwegian disco and dance duo group founded in 1984. The group is composed of Kjetil Røsnes (born 30 March 1960, in Lørenskog) and Kirsti Johansen (born 22 September 1963, in Kristiansand). From the late 1980s and during the 1990s the couple lived and worked in Germany and France. They currently live in Aurskog-Høland, Norway with their two children.

Kjetil Røsnes is owner of Planet Orange Production (a music production company based in Aurskog).

In 1989 the duo had his biggest hit with the song " Johnny, Johnny Come Home" (it was written one year earlier during a night in Hamburg) in France, where it was the number-one single for eight weeks (sold around 700.000). It was successful also in their home country of Norway.

Kjetil Røsnes and Kirsti Johansen wrote " Santa Maria" a successful song both for Dutch singer Tatjana and Samantha Fox.

They later also launched a side-project called K + K.

In 2007 the Blue Moon Band participated in Melodi Grand Prix (MGP) with "Goodbye to yesterday", written by Kjetil + Kirsti.

A year later Avalanche themselves were in MGP with the song "Two Monkeys (On The Roof)". The song was already written in 1997 when the couple lived near Cannes, France. But they could not be at the MGP 2008 together, because of Kirsti was ill. She was replaced by Camilla Alvestad (formerly member of band Reset).

Neither composition reached the MGP-finals in these two years.

Avalanche is a steel bobsled roller coaster at Pleasure Beach Blackpool in Blackpool, England. It was built by Mack of Germany in 1988.

The ride uses three trains, each consisting of 7 cars. Each car can hold two riders, one behind the other.

Avalanche is an EP that was released in October 2000 by Echo & the Bunnymen. The EP was released on CD by Gimme Music and was only available to buy on the internet.

Avalanche is a 1974 album by Mountain. It featured the return of drummer Corky Laing, it was the band's only recording with guitarist David Perry, and the final album to feature bassist/producer Felix Pappalardi.

'Avalanche ' is a 1978 American disaster film, directed by Corey Allen and starring Rock Hudson, Robert Forster, Mia Farrow and Jeanette Nolan. The taglines for the film included "A Winter Wonderland Becomes A Nightmare Of Destruction" and "Six Million Tons Of Icy Terror."

Many avalanche scenes in the film were actually stock footage; parts of this film's avalanche scenes were in turn utilized as stock footage in the film Meteor.

The film is listed in Golden Raspberry Award founder John Wilson's book The Official Razzie Movie Guide as one of The 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made.

Avalanche is the second studio album by Danish soul pop duo Quadron. It was released on 31 May 2013 through Vested in Culture and Epic Records. Upon its release, Avalanche received positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 78, which indicates "generally favorable reviews", based on nine reviews. Despite its positive reception, the album was a relative commercial failure, only peaking at number 115 on the Billboard 200 in the United States. In the group's native Denmark the album archived greater commercial success, spending 12 weeks in the top 10 of the charts and was eventually certified gold for 10,000 copies sold.

Avalanche is a lost 1928 American silent western film, directed by Otto Brower. It stars Jack Holt, Doris Hill, and Olga Baclanova. It was produced and distributed through the Paramount Pictures company.

Avalanche is a 1951 French drama film directed by Raymond Segard and starring Frank Villard, Gaby Sylvia and José de Almeyda.

"Avalanche" is a song by British rock band Bring Me the Horizon. Produced by keyboardist Jordan Fish and vocalist Oliver Sykes, it was featured on the band's 2015 fifth studio album That's the Spirit. Although it was not released as a single, the song reached number 97 on the UK Singles Chart and number seven on the UK Rock & Metal Singles Chart.

Avalanche (commonly known as the Avalanche Gang) is a criminal syndicate involved in phishing attacks. In 2010, the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) reported that Avalanche had been responsible for two-thirds of all phishing attacks in the second half of 2009, describing it as "one of the most sophisticated and damaging on the Internet" and "the world's most prolific phishing gang". The name "Avalanche" also refers to the network of websites and systems which the gang uses to carry out its attacks.

Avalanche was discovered in December 2008, and may be a replacement for a successful phishing group known as Rock Phish which stopped operating in 2008. It is believed to be run from Eastern Europe and was given its name by security researchers because of the high volume of its attacks. Avalanche launched 24% of phishing attacks in the first half of 2009; in the second half of 2009, the APWG recorded 84,250 attacks by Avalanche, constituting 66% of all phishing attacks. The number of total phishing attacks more than doubled, an increase which the APWG directly attributes to Avalanche.

Avalanche uses spam email purporting to come from trusted organisations such as financial institutions or employment websites. Victims are deceived into entering personal information on websites made to appear as though they belong to these organisations. Victims may also be asked to install software by email or at the websites. The software is malware which can log keystrokes, steal passwords and credit card information, and allow unauthorised remote access to the infected computer. Internet Identity's Phishing Trends report for the second quarter of 2009 said that Avalanche "have detailed knowledge of commercial banking platforms, particularly treasury management systems and the Automated Clearing House (ACH) system. They are also performing successful real-time man-in-the-middle attacks that defeat two-factor security tokens."

Avalanche has many similarities to the previous group Rock Phish - the first phishing group which used automated techniques - but has been described as greater in scale and volume. One of the techniques Avalanche uses is to host its domains on compromised computers which are part of a botnet. There is no hosting provider, so it is difficult to take down the domain, requiring the involvement of the responsible domain registrar. In addition, Avalanche uses fast-flux DNS, causing the compromised machines to change constantly. Avalanche attacks also spread the Zeus trojan horse enabling further criminal activity. The majority of domains which Avalanche uses belonged to national domain name registrars in Europe and Asia. This differs from other phishing attacks, where the majority of domains use U.S. registrars. It appears that Avalanche chooses registrars based on their security procedures, returning repeatedly to registrars which do not detect domains being used for fraud, or which were slow to suspend abusive domains. Avalanche frequently registers domains with between one and three registrars, while testing others to check whether their distinctive domains are being detected and blocked. They target a small number of brands (such as specific financial institutions) at a time, but rotate these regularly. A domain which is not suspended by a registrar is often re-used in a later attack. The group has created a phishing "kit", which is pre-prepared for use with many brands.

Avalanche has attracted significant attention from security organisations; as a result, the uptime of the domain names it uses is half that of other phishing domains. In October 2009, ICANN, the organisation which manages the assignment of domain names, issued a Situation Awareness Note encouraging registrars to be pro-active in dealing with Avalanche attacks. The UK registry, Nominet has changed its procedures to make it easier to suspend domains, because of attacks by Avalanche. Interdomain, a Spanish registrar, began requiring a confirmation code delivered by mobile phone in April 2009 which successfully forced Avalanche to stop registering fraudulent domains with them. In November 2009, security companies managed to shut down the Avalanche botnet for a short time; after this Avalanche reduced the scale of its activities and altered its modus operandi. By April 2010, attacks by Avalanche had decreased to just 59 from a high of more than 26,000 in October 2009, raising concerns that a more damaging successor may be on the way.

Avalanche is the third studio album by the Australian indie rock band British India, released through Shock Records on 30 April 2010.

Four bootleg live studio demos were released for sale in a package with the album at JB Hi-Fi. The album debuted at number 10 on the ARIA charts.

is a 1952 Japanese drama film written and directed by Kaneto Shindo.

Avalanche (also sold as Lawine in the Netherlands, and Skill and Astroslide in Germany) is an abstract, mechanical strategy game featuring colored marbles and plastic 'gates'. It was designed by Frank W. Sinden and published by Parker Brothers in 1965.