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The Harm of Glaze

2018-09-07  |   Editor : houguangbing  

Although glaze turns the earth into fantastic and delicate scenery that is purely white and glittering with infinite beauty, but the glaze is a kind of severe weather, hard to remove and highly destructive, of which the damage must not be ignored.

The scale of the harm that glaze causes is directly related to the duration of it. From January 15th to 16th, 1957, a glaze lasted for 30 hours and 9 minutes in Shanghai. The longest glaze in Beijing was 30 hours and 42 minutes long during the first two days in March. The longest one in Harbin lasted for 28 hours and 29 minutes from October 18th to 19th in 1956.

In history, the high-voltage lines in many cities have fallen in a row because of glaze.

The glaze may also be a threat to the air safety of planes. When a plane flies through the clouds with over-cooled water droplets, water will accumulate on the air safety in winter, modern aircraft are equipped with deicing equipment. When the glaze is formed on the road, highway transportation is blocked by the ice on the ground, leading to increasing frequent traffic accidents. Icing on the ground on the mountain roads is also dangerous, as it may make easily slide the car towards the cliff.

The possibility and degree of the disaster caused by glaze greatly exceed those of rime. In areas of high latitude area, glaze is a common phenomenon of disastrous weather. Methods of eliminating the harm of glaze are mainly manual ice removing when glaze appears, like letting the residents near the power transmission line scrape the ice off the line and take measures to get the trees and power grid supported; installing deicing equipment on airplanes or simply bypass around areas of freezing rain, which can mitigate the devastating effects of glaze.

The longest glaze in China also occurred on Mount Emei. It started on November 15th and didn’t stop until March 28th, 1970, that is 3198 hours and 54 minutes. The second longest one is on Mount Heng, namely Nanyue, lasted from December 24th, 1976 to February 19th, 1977, which is 1,370 hours and 57 minutes.The third longest one is on Mount Xuefeng in Hunan province, lasting 1,192 hours and 9 minutes from December 25th, 1976 to February 12th, 1977.

As the ice continues to freeze and thicken, it often breaks off branches, so the glaze will also cause serious damage to trees. The hard ice layer also rots the crops that it covers. If the wheat fields freeze, the reviving winter wheat will get frozen and broken and so will the seedling planted in the early spring. In addition, the glaze also destroys a large area of young forest and frostbites fruit trees. Agriculture, animal husbandry, transportation and other industries suffer great losses. Severe freezing rain also collapses houses, endangering people's lives and property.

In October, 1997, Chengde city, Hebei province, there was a rare glaze in the Saihanba tree farm from 27th to 28th October 1977 with affected area of 400,000 mu, about more than half of the total area of woodland at that time, making more than 600,000 trees broken. Among those damaged trees, there were many with broken trunks and crowns and split and severe bending branches which were in the severely afflicted area of about 200,000 mu. The loss is more than 50,000,000 mature trees, as the damaged area is more than 300,000 cubic meters, equivalent to the loss of about 960,000 cubic meters of wood, about 27 million yuan to 28 million yuan.

In addition, the biggest harm of glaze is that it breaks off power lines. The towers of high-tension cables may bear 2 to 3 times of load in the snow but 10 ~ 20 times when there is glaze. And wires freeze as a result of the glaze on them and they contract on being cooled. With the shock that wind brings and the impact of the weight of glaze, the electricity lines and telephone lines will burden too much to avoid being broken, in this way poles of thousands of meters to dozens of kilometers fall in a row, leading to the suspension of electricity transmission, communication, severe impact on the local industrial and agricultural production.

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