Abstract
On the basis of the evidence of fractality reported in the literature as regards snow materialand snow avalanches, the paper introduces a statistical model for the natural release of slabavalanches characterized by the differing cohesion of the snow cover at different scales.Under the hypothesis of scale invariance of shear strength, this model can beused to estimate the stability of snow slopes of different types, and to examinewhether defects can propagate from the microscale (cohesion and friction) to themacroscale of the weak plane (big avalanche) or whether they eventually stop at acertain scale (small event). This may shed light on the apparently inexplicabledifferences in behaviour of snow covers which look macroscopically similar, under thesame mechanical loads, and which may eventually trigger an avalanche or not.
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