  We investigate avalanches associated with plastic rearrangements and the
nature of structural change in the prototypical strong glass, silica,
computationally. Although qualitative aspects of yielding in silica are similar
to other glasses, we find that the statistics of avalanches exhibits
non-trivial behaviour. Investigating the statistics of avalanches and clusters
in detail, we propose and verify a new relation between exponents
characterizing the size distribution of avalanches and clusters. Across the
yielding transition, anomalous structural change and densification, associated
with a suppression of tetrahedral order, is observed to accompany strain
localisation.
