On 2 January 2019, an avalanche in northern Norway claimed the lives of one Swedish and three Finnish skiers. This accident marked the beginning of the deadliest avalanche season in Norway in over a decade. In total, 13 people were killed in avalanches and many others were involved in avalanche accidents but were fortunate to survive. On average, 100 people in the European alps and 40 people in North America are killed annually in avalanche accidents. In 90% of those fatal accidents, the victim or somebody in the victim's party triggered the avalanche, implying that people’s decisions in avalanche terrain are the leading cause of avalanche fatalities. In avalanche terrain, people with different knowledge have to make decisions with limited amounts of information under time restrictions. This makes avalanche terrain – commonly encountered in many of the Nordic countries - the ideal test-bed to investigate questions with far broader implications: How do people make decisions under uncertainty? How can a decision process be structured to enable novices to make accurate and precise decisions with limited cognitive burden? What affects a group decision, and how can the decision process for a group be structured in order to harness the wisdom of the crowd? How can we facilitate experiential learning in an environment where feedback is absent? Avalanche terrain is a particularly vexing environment for decision making because the key hazard element–snow–is known to change rapidly over space and time. Even with robust data on the physical properties of the snowpack, uncertainty remains across multiple, often unknown temporal and spatial scales. In addition, avalanche terrain constitutes an unreliable learning environment in which one can make the wrong decision to ski an unsafe, avalanche prone slope, but by luck—and unknowingly—not trigger an avalanche and instead enjoy a fun ski descent as a false reward for mistaken judgement. To investigate the case of decision-making in avalanche terrain, we are dependent on interdisciplinarity. Experts on snow science provide data on the environment and relevant decision-factors. Experts on human judgement and decision-making will develop novel tools to aid avalanche risk assessment. To generalize we will also assessed and compare the tools in the field of medical decision-making. The project is funded by Nordforsk.
