Just after two in the morning the snow cornice over the cave collapsed.

Suddenly they were again in a region of swirling light snow, approaching a rock wall topped by a curling snow cornice.

"The snow cornice is falling," said Rohde.

The northeast ridge just kept climbing in a series of swooping, knife-edged snow cornices, each side dropping away almost vertically.

Females of its winter broods are often wingless and are found scuttling on snow cornices over the stream.

Above the cliffs and set a few feet back was a continuous ice wall over twenty feet high, surmounted by an overhanging snow cornice.

Snow cornices and glaze ice still glowed along the western side of the peaks, which rose a kilometer or more above the rising tramcar.

Over the edge (with perilous-looking snow cornices even in early summer) Loch Ericht stretched away as far as we could see through endless mountain ranges.

A sizable snow cornice usually forms along the summit ridge in winter, the collapse of which has claimed the life of a number of people who stood on it.

A snow cornice or simply cornice is an overhanging edge of snow on a ridge or the crest of a mountain and along the sides of gullies.

It was good as far as their present shelter went, but the snow cornice on top of the wall would begin to build up and as it grew heavier it would be more likely to break off.

Stéphane Brosse died on June 17, 2012 while crossing the Aiguille d'Argentière in the Mont Blanc massif when a snow cornice collapsed under him, resulting in him falling between 600 and 700 metres.

Tom Kneen, cousin of Peter Kneen who designed the MUMC Hut, died in August 1985 when he and three companions strayed onto the snow cornice in a virtual whiteout near the summit.

Close up, she could see the overhanging snow cornices topping the vertical walls of rock and ice on either side, the smooth floor carved into crevasses a thousand feet long and forty feet wide, lying in wait for the unwary climber beneath masking drifts of deep snow.