Snow Slab Fracture Propagation

Slab avalanches don't release just because a slope is steep — they release because a crack in a buried weak layer grows past a critical length and becomes self-sustaining. This simulator renders a gridded snow slab sitting on a weak layer across a tunable slope, and lets you trigger a local collapse of a chosen flaw size. Using the same anticrack energy-balance criterion behind the field Propagation Saw Test, it computes the driving stress from your slope angle and slab thickness, the critical crack length from the weak layer's fracture energy, and — if your flaw exceeds that threshold — animates the fracture front racing outward at a physically estimated propagation speed before the whole isolated slab breaks away and slides.