VDEW GM

05/04/2022

Perhaps the most astonishing place to receive snow ever is Death Valley, California. Considered by some measures to be the hottest place on Earth, with surface temperatures that have reached 120º Fahrenheit, it's not the place you might expect to see snow fall. But it's actually happened several times, most recently in December 2008, when the Funeral Mountains—a range of peaks along the California-Nevada border—got a light dusting

05/04/2022

The northern New York city of Syracuse is among the snowiest in the United States, which can get a bit exhausting for those who live there. In a tongue-in-cheek attempt to curb the annual onslaught, in 1992, the city's Common Council passed a decree that outlawed snow before Christmas Eve, stating, "Be it resolved, on behalf of the snow-weary citizens of the city of Syracuse, any further snowfall is expressly outlawed in the city of Syracuse until December 24, 1992.

05/04/2022

Everyone loves a good snowball fight, but snow can sometimes create massive snowballs on its own. Through a rare phenomenon called "snow rollers," the wind blows a bunch of snow along the ground, which gets larger and accumulates more material as it goes, taking on a cylindrical shape and hollow (rather than the circular one we might expect). Sometimes these can take the form of "snow donuts" as the outer layers are blown away, giving the appearance of, well, a donut.

05/04/2022

According to the National Snow & Ice Data Center, due to various weather conditions, snow can take on a wide range of forms once it lands, each with very different appearances and shapes. For example, a "cornice" occurs when an overhang of ice and wind-blown snow creates a kind of cliff, while tall, thin "penitents" happen in arid regions, creating stunning fields of snow spires that can rise as high as several meters high.

05/04/2022

Snow crystals can take three other forms of crystals. There's hoarfrost, or deposits of frozen water v***r that create clear, furry-looking "frost on steroids." That's the stuff that sticks on poles, wires, and fences. There's graupel, which consists of snowflakes that have become rounded pellets as large as 5 millimeters. Sometimes, graupel is mistaken for hail. Finally, there are polycrystals, which are snowflakes made up of numerous individual ice crystals. Those are the large ones you might see during storms that make you say, "Wow, these are such large snowflakes!"

03/04/2022

It's a bit of cliché, but get this: it's actually true. The saying was originally asserted by anthropologist Franz Boas, in 1911, as he was traveling through the icy landscape of Canada's Baffin Island. While there, he noted the wide range of terms for all the different forms of snow, from "softly falling snow" (aqilokoq) to "the snow that is good for driving sled" (piegnartoq), stating that there were had dozens, if not hundreds, of Eskimo words for the stuff.

03/04/2022

Though supporting evidence is limited, the Guinness World Records book lists the largest snowflake on record to be one from a January 1887 storm in Fort Keogh, Montana. Measuring 15 inches wide, the rancher who spotted it described it as "larger than milk pans."

03/04/2022

The classic image of a snowflake, with its star shape and six arms, is actually a snow crystal. Snowflakes can be a wider range of crystal formations, from a single crystal to a small cluster to what Kenneth G. Libbrecht, a snowflake devotee at the California Institute of Technology, calls "monster snowflakes," resulting from when crystals "collide in midair and stick together to form flimsy puffballs." But a snow crystal is the tiny thing that forms when water molecules align hexagonally and freeze together.

03/04/2022

When Elvis sang about having a "Blue Christmas," he could have been literal. Snow can appear blue to the naked eye, for reasons similar to why it appears white (bending light). But in cases where the light penetrates deeper into the snow, more red light might get absorbed than blue light. In polar and alpine regions that contain algae with a red pigment, snow can take on a pink appearance.

03/04/2022

Technically, snow is translucent, a fact that's clear when you look at individual snowflakes under a microscope. The difference relates to the way that light bends when it hits the individual crystals that make up a snow bank. As Sarah Stone explains for Gizmodo, "So when one of these tiny, beautiful ice crystal formations bend light, that light ultimately encounters another ice crystal in the clump of snowflakes where it is also bent, and then another and another…light waves will ultimately be reflected, and thus the sunlight will appear white to you."

03/04/2022

03/04/2022