Let it Snow: Mind-Blowing Facts About Snow

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Let it Snow: Mind-Blowing Facts About Snow

Snow may be the only thing on Earth that is simultaneously enchanting and annoying, completely necessary, and extremely dangerous. But no matter if you love or hate it, or both at the same time, snow is an essential part of the Earth’s ecosystem. Snow is a common form of winter weather that you simply must prepare for.

Let it Snow: Mind-Blowing Facts About Snow:

1. Fresh snow absorbs sound, lowering ambient noise over a landscape because the trapped air between snowflakes attenuates vibration. That’s why it gets so quiet when it snows.
2. The first step in the formation of a snowflake is an extremely cold-water droplet freezing onto a pollen or dust particle in the sky. This creates an ice crystal. 
3. Each winter there are about a septillion snowflake that fall from the sky. That's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. (24 zeroes!)
4. The largest single ice crystal ever documented measured just 0.39 inches (1 centimetre) from tip to tip. Most are much smaller than that.
5. The most snow to ever fall in 24 hours happened in Capracotta, Italy on March 5th, 2015. 100.8 inches (2.56 meters) of snow fell in a 24-hour period. Chronophobia is an extreme fear of snow and snowy weather. People with this disorder have severe anxiety and panic attacks when they think about or see snow. To avoid snow, they may live in warmer climates or stay indoors during winter.
6. Snowflakes are nearly always six-sided, though they can also have three or twelve sides.
7. The declaration that no two snowflakes are alike arose from photographer Wilson Bentley, who became the first person to photograph a snowflake in 1885. He subsequently photographed over 5,000 snowflakes throughout his lifetime and never found any duplicates.
8. Snow can cause “snow blindness” because of the ultraviolet radiation it reflects. You should always wear eye protection when you’re skiing or playing in the snow!
9. It takes about 1 hour for a snowflake to reach the ground, descending between 1 and 4 mph (1.6 – 6.3 kilometres per hour), depending on conditions.
10. A blizzard differs from a snowstorm, just as a hurricane differs from a tropical storm. For a storm to be classified as a blizzard, winds must be at least 35 mph (56 km/h), with snowfall heavy enough to drop visibility to a quarter mile or less (0.4 km) for at least three hours.
11. Snow is a great insulator because it is up to 95% trapped air. Ten inches of fluffy fresh snow can be as low as seven percent water and 93 percent air. This is the reason many animals burrow deep into the snow during winter in order to hibernate. It’s also the reason that igloos, that use only body heat to warm them, can be 100 degrees warmer inside than outside. 
12. Snow falling through the air picks up nitrogen, a good fertilizer for plants and trees, which is released to the soil when the snow melts. Snow insulates the roots of dormant plants and protects them from temperature swings, acting like mulch.
13. An avalanche cannot be triggered by noise. Gunshots, singing, yodelling, and supersonic booms will have no effect. The only trigger is a shift in the weight of the snow load, either by more snow falling or melting, a shift in the wind, or the added weight of a skier or snowmobiler.
14. The Ski-Doo snowmobile, first released in 1959, was originally supposed to be called the “Ski-Dog.” However, there was a typo in the first batch of brochures, and the company decided to roll with it.
15. Salt melts ice and help prevent re-freezing by lowering the freezing point of water. This phenomenon is called freezing point depression.
16. Snow is not white. You can certainly dream of a white Christmas, even if it isn’t strictly accurate. The ‘white stuff’ isn’t actually white, but rather translucent. It’s the light reflecting off it that makes it appear white with the many sides of the snowflake scattering light in many directions, diffusing the entire colour spectrum.
17. A snowflake is made of frozen water, so it has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom (H2O).
18. Contents of explorer Ernest Shackleton medical kit during the Nimrod Expedition sounds more like the rider for a 70s rock band than a polar exploration. Colic was treated with cannabis, diarrhoea sufferers enjoyed the delights of opium while those stricken with snow blindness, a temporary loss of vision due to overexposure to the sun's UV rays, would have cocaine dripped directly into the eye.

By the way, did you know that you can make ice cream using snow? 

All you need is 2 cups milk, 1 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon vanilla extract and about a gallon of the best snow you can find. Mix the milk, sugar and vanilla together and add snow, a little at a time, until you have a thick, creamy texture. One bite and you’ll be hoping spring never comes!