# Tag Info

1

About 50 years ago in Reader's Digest there was an article about a Soviet airplane pilot who bailed out at high altitude. He fell into a snow-filled ravine and survived. If the angle of the snow is high enough it is no big deal. At Squaw Valley I have seen skiers do drops that might have been 100 feet. If the landing is steep enough it is OK. It is ...

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Nice theoretical answers (I can certainly appreciate them, I'm a mathematician). But why delve into theory when experiment is available? In this video you can see a skier jump from more than 200 feet and get head first into the snow, without a helmet. The video starts with the aftermath, if you want to see the jump right away fast forward to about 1 ...

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This is another chance to use one of my favorite approximations ever! I first offered it as an answer to a question about how deep a platform diver will go into the water. Now is the chance to use it again! Issac Newton developed an expression for the ballistic impact depth of a body into a material. The original idea was expressed for materials of ...

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@Señor O gives a very good answer, but he assumes an ideal deceleration. Based on a viewing of the scene, Anna sinks a little under a meter, while Kristoff doesn't sink more than half a meter. Since they fell about 200 feet (about 60 m), my initial estimate for their impact velocity is (assuming no air resistance): $v = \sqrt{2gh} = \sqrt{2*60*9.8} ... 30 As a very rude guess, fresh snow (see page vi) can have a density of$0.3 g/cm^3$and be compressed all the way to about the density of ice,$0.9 g/cm^3$. Under perfect conditions you could see a 13 feet uniform deceleration when landing in 20 feet of snow, or about 4 meters. Going from$30 m/s$to$0m/s$(as @Sean suggested in comments), you'd have ... 0 Concepts Assume the projected area,$A$, of the book is about equal to the projected area of the paper as they both fall towards the earth. The fundamental principles are (1) Different gravitational force,$F_m=mg$, that acts on each object's mass, m (2) Similar opposing drag forces,$F_d=-(1/2)C_d A \rho v^2 \$ which act on each object in air (3) ...

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I'm not exactly sure what you are asking. If you're wondering about how we know that bodies of different masses fall at the same rate if we ignore other factors like air resistance, then you might want to take a look at experiments like these. If you are interested in how we arrive at the conclusion that the acceleration is equal to gravity, we can ...

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If the mass of both the objects are high such that air resistance in negligible in them then both of them will touch the ground at the same time. If the body with smaller mass is so small that air resistance can't be neglected then the body with heavier mass will reach the ground faster.

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