A couple of sunny, above-freezing days turns a smooth-surface snowbank into "rotten snow".
It's not rotten in the normal sense of the word, but the moisture created from a little thawing at the base of the snowbank,
along with some heat reflected from a nearby building, causes the structure of the snow to change into a more granular,
unstable form than normal. (For a sense of scale, the leaf is about 1" [2.5 cm] long.)
Depending on the weather over the next few days, the two-foot [60 cm] snowbank may melt gradually, or it may slide like an avalanche.
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