Graceful beauty snowflakes
In normal snowfall We don’t think that an ordinary snowflake, when studied through a microscope, can present a beautiful sight and amaze us with the correctness and complexity of its forms. snowfall consists of such beauty.
By the way, the snow itself is not only white. In arctic and mountainous regions, pink or even red snow is common. The fact is that algae living between its crystals color entire areas of snow. But there are cases when snow fell from the sky already colored - blue, green, gray and black.
Yes, for Christmas 1969 in Sweden fell black Snow. Most likely, this happened due to the fact that the snow, when falling, absorbed soot and industrial pollution from the atmosphere. In any case, laboratory testing of air samples revealed the presence of the insecticide DDT in the black snow
The mathematician was especially struck by the “tiny white dot” he found in the middle of the snowflake, as if it were the trace of the leg of a compass that was used to outline its circumference.
The great astronomer Johannes Kepler in his treatise “New Year's Gift. On Hexagonal Snowflakes” explained the shape of crystals by the will of God. Japanese scientist Nakaya Ukichiro called snow “a letter from heaven, written in secret hieroglyphs.”
He was the first to create a classification of snowflakes. The only one in the world named after Nakai snowflake museum , located on the island of Hokkaido.
Complex star-shaped snowflakes have a unique geometric shape that can be distinguished by the eye. And there are more variants of such forms, according to physicist John Nelson from Ritsumeikan University (Japanese) in Kyoto, than there are atoms in the observable Universe.
During snowfall In 1987, a world record snowflake with a diameter of 38 cm was found in Fort Coy (Montana, USA).
Any of us knows very well that one snowflake is practically weightless: it is enough to place your palm under the falling snowball.
An ordinary snowflake weighs about a milligram(very rarely 2-3 milligrams), although there are exceptions - the largest snowflakes fell on April 30, 1944 in Moscow. Caught in the palm, they covered almost the entire palm and resembled ostrich feathers.
More than half the world's population has never haven't seen snow except in photographs.
A layer of one centimeter of snow compacted over the winter provides 25-35 cubic meters of water per 1 hectare
Snowflakes consist of 95% from thin air, which causes low density and a relatively slow fall speed (0.9 km/h).
You can eat snow. True, the energy consumption of eating snow is many times greater than its calorie content.
A snowflake is one of the most fantastic examples of self-organization of matter from simple to complex.
In the Far North, the snow can be so hard that when an ax hits it, it rings as if struck by iron.
The shapes of snowflakes are incredibly diverse - there are more than five thousand of them. Even a special international classification has been developed in which snowflakes are combined into ten classes. These are stars, plates, columns, needles, hail, tree-like crystals resembling fern stems. The sizes of the winter miracle range from 0.1 to 7 millimeters.
Creaking snow– it’s just noise from crushed crystals. Of course, the human ear cannot perceive the sound of one “broken” snowflake. But the myriads of crushed crystals create a very clear creaking sound. Snow creaks only in cold weather, and the pitch of the creaking changes depending on the air temperature - the stronger the frost, the higher the pitch of the creaking. Scientists made acoustic measurements and found that in the spectrum of snow creaking there are two gentle and not sharply expressed maxima - in the range of 250-400 Hz and 1000-1600 Hz.
Snowflakes viewed through a microscope are God's wonderful handiwork. Each crystallized raindrop - which is snow - has a certain systematic pattern with countless varieties - several of them are represented in the figure.
When it snows, we don't think about it that an ordinary snowflake under a microscope is a beautiful sight and amazes with its regularity and complexity of shape. Snowflakes look like roses, lilies and wheels with six teeth. He was especially struck by the “tiny white dot” he found in the middle of the snowflake, as if it were the trace of the leg of a compass that was used to outline its circumference.”
For some of us, the winter months present an uninvited guest in the form of endless snow. In order to brighten up the winter sadness for you, we will tell you interesting facts about fluffy snow that each of us should know:
10. Snowflakes begin their lives as grains of sand.
Moisture is, of course, a necessary ingredient in snow. However, water is found everywhere in the atmosphere in the form of vapor and small droplets, and only some of this moisture becomes snow. The catalyst for this process is the condensation nucleus. These nuclei can be anything from certain air pollution to ash from forest fires or volcanic eruptions, or radioactive particles from nuclear explosions. They can also be sea salt, meteorite dust from space, dust from Earth, or pollen.
When the atmosphere is too hot or dry, dust and water remain separated. The dust creates an atmospheric haze that can sometimes be seen hanging over large cities in the summer. Water droplets do not freeze instantly when the air temperature drops to 0 degrees Celsius and can remain supercooled down to -40 degrees Celsius. However, when the droplets come into contact with the solid surface of a dust particle, they freeze at much higher temperatures, in some cases temperatures above -6 degrees Celsius. Because each dust particle is different from the others, the droplets freeze at different temperatures.
9. Snowflakes are minerals
As water droplets freeze, the water vapor surrounding them condenses on their surface. Because of the V-shaped angle between oxygen and two hydrogen atoms in each water molecule, the molecules attach to each other in a hexagonal shape. Therefore, snowflakes first form as hexagonal prismatic crystals, which are about the size of a dot in a sentence.
Prismatic crystals can be slender columns like wooden pencils, flat like six-sided slabs of glass, or anything in between. As more water vapor attaches to them, the columns expand or become needle-like while the plates develop six branches that themselves branch off, eventually forming the familiar, fern-like snowflake shape. A typical snowflake contains 180 billion water molecules.
The structure of each snowflake depends on the water available and the temperature with which it interacts. Even snowflakes next to each other form into different shapes. This is why there are virtually no two identical snowflakes.
Statistically, this famous fact sounds dubious. Every winter, on average, one septillion (that's 1 followed by 24 zeros) of snowflakes falls from the sky. If we take into account all the winters in the past, it is quite logical to assume that the two snowflakes should have been identical. However, the complexity of snowflakes is so great that their variety is almost endless. And if we consider them atomically, their complexity increases even more. About 1 in 3,000 hydrogen atoms has a neutron in its nucleus, making it heavy hydrogen. These changes in hydrogen are distributed differently in each snowflake and reduce the chances of two identical snowflakes forming to almost zero.
Despite their differences, snowflakes are the same in that their molecules adopt an ordered crystal lattice structure. And because they are solid, natural, and inorganic, snow falls into an unexpected classification: minerals. That's right, snow is in the same class as diamonds, sapphires and rubies. If you don't mind keeping your hand in the freezer, then it can probably be set into a ring.
8. Cereals: falling snow balls
Snowflakes are quite small and when the atmosphere is cold and dry, they remain that way. Dry snow is very annoying for those who like to play snowballs because there is not enough moisture in it for the snow to stick together into snowballs.
But when the troposphere is completely or partially warm, snowflakes melt a little, resulting in a wet film forming on their outside. When another snowflake crashes into it, they stick together to form a larger snowflake. Then the snowflake grows larger and larger, colliding with other snowflakes. If only light winds are present, these snowflakes stay together on their way to the ground, reaching the size of a silver dollar or larger. The largest snowflake in the world, according to the Guinness Book of Records, fell on a ranch in Fort Keogh, Montana in January 1887. The rancher measured it and saw that its diameter was 38 centimeters, about the size of a Frisbee plate.
Snowflakes can also form graupel, a distinct type of precipitation. Don't be surprised if you've never heard of them because they are often mistaken for hail or sleet. Hail is usually associated with thunderstorms rather than blizzards. In addition, its formation requires upward wind currents blowing at a speed of 100 kilometers per hour or more. A drop of precipitation freezes and an upward flow of air sends it upward, where it collides with a large amount of water, which forms another layer on it. Thus, the hail grows in size until it becomes too heavy to be carried upward by the air current. It can become as big as a golf ball. If you cut it open, you can see rings indicating layers of ice. Another name for sleet is ice pellets, rain that freezes just before it hits the ground.
Krupa, on the other hand, begins its life as a snowflake. As the snowflake falls, it passes through a cloud of supercooled droplets approximately 10 millimeters in diameter. The drop sticks to the snowflake and freezes. The image above is a real dendritic snowflake. A large lumpy ball is attached to its center. These grains tend to remain small and much softer than the icy surface of the hail. They are tiny snowballs that are only suitable for a snowball fight between Jonathan Swift's Lilliputians.
7. Snow is not always white
Snow appears white because the complex structure of snowflakes gives it multiple surfaces to reflect light across the color spectrum. What little sunlight a snowflake absorbs is also distributed evenly. Because the visible light spectrum is white, snow appears white to us. In fact, this is why we see most white substances as white. This is due to the unusual way in which they scatter light. Without their complex structure, snowflakes are liquid water or pure ice, which is transparent rather than white.
Snowflakes don't have to be white either. Blue snow is an alternative result of light scattering and absorption. Blue color is more difficult to absorb than other colors and if we look at snow from a distance, we can see blue shades among the white ones.
Photosynthetic algae can also give snow a red, orange, purple, brown or green hue. The most common color is red or pink and is commonly called "watermelon snow" due to its color and sweet taste (although it is not recommended to eat). Snow is known to fall in different colors, usually due to air pollution. In 2007, orange, foul-smelling, oily snow fell in Siberia.
6. Deadly snow
There are approximately 105 snow storms in the United States each year, and each storm can produce 39 million tons of snow. equivalent to 11,000 Empire State Buildings of snow falling on Americans every year. Is it any wonder that snow storms can cause infrastructure to stop functioning in entire cities?
A 2010 study found that local economies could suffer between $300 million and $700 million in losses due to a single day of infrastructure downtime. And that doesn't even include lost tax revenue. It also does not reflect the cost of snow removal. Missouri spent $1.2 million to salt its roads during one February snowstorm in 2011.
In addition, there is a cost in the form of lives. Since 1936, snowstorms have caused 200 deaths annually. Approximately 70 percent of these deaths are due to automobile accidents. Another 25 percent are the result of overexertion from shoveling snow or pushing cars. The remaining 5 percent comes from roof collapses, house fires, carbon monoxide poisoning from stranded cars, or electrocution from broken power lines.
And that's not even counting blizzards, which depend not on snowfall, but on constant (three hours or more) winds blowing at a speed of at least 56 kilometers per hour. Blizzards do not occur as frequently or as deadly as other extreme weather events such as hurricanes or tornadoes, but not all hurricanes or tornadoes kill people. Unlike almost every snowstorm, which results in loss of life.
In February 1972, Iran suffered a snowstorm that lasted a week. During this time, several villages were covered with an 8-meter layer of snow, because of which all the inhabitants died. The number of deaths has reached 4,000. By comparison, the deadliest tornado in history, which occurred in Bangladesh in 1989, killed 1,300 people.
5. Giant Snowman
Most of us can't create real snow sculptures. The best we get is three large balls stacked on top of each other with a carrot for a nose and coals for eyes. When we step back to admire our creation, we often wonder who could have done it better. And here is the answer to your question.
The world's largest snow woman was Olympia, 37.2 meters high according to the Guinness Book of Records. She was named after an elderly Maine senator at the time (Olympia Snowe) and the residents of the town of Bethel spent a month sculpting the snow woman in 2008. Her eyelashes were made from skis and her eyes were made from giant wreaths, her lips were made from old tires painted red. The snow woman's hands were two 8.2-meter pine trees. To give her style, a 30.5-meter scarf was draped over her, car tires were attached in the form of buttons, and a 2-meter pendant was hung around her neck.
While she may not like to admit it, she weighs 6 million kilograms.
4. Artificial snow
People have been attaching wooden planks to their feet and skiing down mountains for the last 4,000 years, but it wasn't until the 1800s that skiing was recognized as a recreational and sporting event. Another 50 years passed before the first snow-making machine was patented. In March 1949, Wayne Pierce, Art Hunt, and Dave Richey attached a soda hose to a spray paint compressor. They demonstrated how water, pushed through a spout, is sprayed onto a mist, allowing it to solidify at higher temperatures.
In 1961, Alden Hanson patented a snow machine that used a fan to shoot snowflakes over long distances. In 1975, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin discovered an even better nucleating agent: a biodegradable protein that helps water form ice crystals. In other words: dirt. As with sand and natural snow, it acted as a catalyst for water to freeze in warm weather. Today, snow machines (“guns”) make snow much the same way Mother Nature does.
When the 2014 Winter Olympics were held in the beach resort of Sochi, Russia, organizers had 500 snowmakers ready to make sure there would be enough snow. The average February temperature in Sochi is 4.4 degrees Celsius. Therefore, just in case, the Olympic Committee stocked up on 710,000 cubic meters of snow taken from the Caucasus Mountains last winter.
In preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Chinese scientists said they had caused the first artificial snowfall over the Tibetan Plateau. In 2007, they shot cigarette-sized sticks of silver iodide into the clouds, causing 1 centimeter of snow to fall. The molecular lattice of silvered iodine is similar to and binds to water, acting like sand to natural snow and freezing the water. China used it again in 2009, hoping to ease the drought around Beijing. It's unclear whether cloud seeding works, mainly because it's hard to prove whether snow was going to come from an incoming cloud anyway.
Of course, sometimes people really need it to snow indoors. This requires artificial snow. One of the easiest ways to create it is to add cold water to sodium polyacrylate. This results in the formation of crystals that look and feel like real snow. Well, where can you find sodium polyacrylate? In disposable diapers. You didn't disobey: every time a baby pees in a diaper, it also makes warm, yellow snow.
3. It also snows on two planets that are our neighbors in the solar system
Mars experiences wild temperature fluctuations. If you were standing on the Martian equator, you might slip out of your shoes, but you'd still need a hat. The reason is that the temperature at your feet will be 21 degrees Celsius and at chest level 0 degrees Celsius. That's why you would be able to see the snow on your shoulders, which would disappear before it hit your fingers. In 2008, Mars Lander observed Martian snowfall that evaporated before the snow fell to the ground.
However, Martian snow actually reaches the surface, especially around the poles. The photo above shows the North Pole of Mars. This snow is not water. This is frozen carbon dioxide. The crystals are microscopic, probably the size of red blood cells. They fall out like mist. The dry and powdery particles don't stick together into a snowball, but that would be a skier's dream. In rare cases, water-ice still falls on Mars.
Snow also falls on Venus and is much stranger than Martian snow. It does not consist of water or carbon dioxide. Venusian snow is made of metal.
Venus's lowlands are strewn with pyrite minerals. Along with extreme atmospheric pressure and temperatures of up to 480 degrees Celsius, minerals evaporate and rise into an atmosphere of carbon dioxide. At the higher, colder altitudes atop the great Venusian mountains, a metallic fog shrouds the slopes with bismuth sulfide and lead sulfide, better known as bismuthin and galena.
Science doesn't know whether real snow falls on Venus, but rain has been spotted on its surface. Again, rain on Venus is very different from rain on Earth. It consists of sulfuric acid.
2. The biggest snowball fights in the world
Currently, the largest snowball fight in the world is held by the residents of Seattle. Anyone who has lived in the Emerald City knows that in this city it rains much more often than it snows. So when Seattle wanted to sponsor a fundraiser that ended with a legendary snowball fight, they had to bring 34 truckloads (or 74,000 kilograms) of snow from the Cascade Mountains to downtown Seattle, right next to the Space Needle.
Six thousand tickets for the fight were sold online and each ticket holder received a bracelet. On the designated Snow Day, January 12, 2013, 5,834 ticket holders had their wristbands scanned before entering the arena. The arena was roughly divided in half with several snow forts scattered around the perimeter. Some participants brought equipment for making snowballs.
The previous record was held by 5,387 South Koreans who threw more snowballs into the air than at each other. This couldn't happen in Seattle. At 5:30 pm, 130 judges from the Guinness Book of Records surrounded the square and gave the signal for battle. They disqualified those who did not throw a snowball within the next 90 seconds. The video shows huge curtains of flying snowballs. Some participants received scars. At the end of the allotted time, Seattle set a new record. By the end of the day, $50,000 had been raised for the Boys and Girls Club.
The unofficial record for the largest snowball fight belongs to long-dead men. During the Civil War, the two Confederate blocs attacked each other with nothing more than snowballs. Two snowstorms on February 19 and 21, 1863, dropped 43 centimeters of snow on Fredericksburg, Virginia, where General Thomas's II Corps was camped for the winter.
General Robert Hoke's brigade had a friendly rivalry with Colonel William Stiles' 16th. On the morning of February 25, Hawk's five North Carolina regiments attacked Stiles' camp. The Georgians, who mostly comprised Stiles's regiment, fought off the attack and marched on Hawk's camp. Robert Hawk's soldiers were waiting with their sacks filled with snowballs. The melee that followed included approximately 10,000 participants.
1. The coolest annual snow festival
If you are still upset, there is a place on Earth where you should go. It's so stunning that it can put winter to shame. Every January, nearly 30 million visitors travel to Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang Province in northeast China, to attend the International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival. The average temperature in Harbin is -17 degrees Celsius, and the recorded record temperature is -35 degrees Celsius. Thanks to this, there are all conditions for snow and ice sculptors to create their own designs.
The festival began in 1963 as an ice lantern garden party. It was delayed for decades due to China's Cultural Revolution, but was revived as an annual event in 1985. The festival is sponsored entirely by the Chinese government and lasts about a month, ending with a day dedicated to destroying the sculptures with ice picks.
Ice lanterns are hollowed-out sculptures with a candle inside and are still part of the celebrations, but the crowd wants to see life-size ice buildings and structures. In December 2007, 600 sculptors took part in the construction of the world's largest snow sculpture to open the 2008 festival. The sculpture, called “Romantic Feelings,” reached a height of 35 meters and its length was 200 meters. It included an ice maiden, a cathedral and a Russian-style temple.
For some of us, the winter months present an uninvited guest in the form of endless snow. I will tell you interesting facts about fluffy snow that each of us should know.
Snowflakes are minerals
As water droplets freeze, the water vapor surrounding them condenses on their surface. Because of the V-shaped angle between oxygen and two hydrogen atoms in each water molecule, the molecules attach to each other in a hexagonal shape. Therefore, snowflakes first form as hexagonal prismatic crystals, which are about the size of a dot in a sentence.
Prismatic crystals can be slender columns like wooden pencils, flat like six-sided slabs of glass, or anything in between. As more water vapor attaches to them, the columns expand or become needle-like while the plates develop six branches that themselves branch off, eventually forming the familiar, fern-like snowflake shape. A typical snowflake contains 180 billion water molecules.
The structure of each snowflake depends on the water available and the temperature with which it interacts. Even snowflakes next to each other form into different shapes. This is why there are virtually no two identical snowflakes.
Statistically, this famous fact sounds dubious. Every winter, on average, one septillion (that's 1 followed by 24 zeros) of snowflakes falls from the sky. If we take into account all the winters in the past, it is quite logical to assume that the two snowflakes should have been identical. However, the complexity of snowflakes is so great that their variety is almost endless. And if we consider them atomically, their complexity increases even more. About 1 in 3,000 hydrogen atoms has a neutron in its nucleus, making it heavy hydrogen. These changes in hydrogen are distributed differently in each snowflake and reduce the chances of two identical snowflakes forming to almost zero.
Despite their differences, snowflakes are the same in that their molecules adopt an ordered crystal lattice structure. And because they are solid, natural, and inorganic, snow falls into an unexpected classification: minerals. That's right, snow is in the same class as diamonds, sapphires and rubies. If you don't mind keeping your hand in the freezer, then it can probably be set into a ring.
Snowflakes begin their lives as grains of sand.
Moisture is, of course, a necessary ingredient in snow. However, water is found everywhere in the atmosphere in the form of vapor and small droplets, and only some of this moisture becomes snow. The catalyst for this process is the condensation nucleus. These nuclei can be anything from certain air pollution to ash from forest fires or volcanic eruptions, or radioactive particles from nuclear explosions. They can also be sea salt, meteorite dust from space, dust from Earth, or pollen.
When the atmosphere is too hot or dry, dust and water remain separated. The dust creates an atmospheric haze that can sometimes be seen hanging over large cities in the summer. Water droplets do not freeze instantly when the air temperature drops to 0 degrees Celsius and can remain supercooled down to -40 degrees Celsius. However, when the droplets come into contact with the solid surface of a dust particle, they freeze at much higher temperatures, in some cases temperatures above -6 degrees Celsius. Because each dust particle is different from the others, the droplets freeze at different temperatures.
Cereals: falling snow balls 
Snowflakes are quite small and when the atmosphere is cold and dry, they remain that way. Dry snow is very annoying for those who like to play snowballs because there is not enough moisture in it for the snow to stick together into snowballs.
But when the troposphere is completely or partially warm, snowflakes melt a little, resulting in a wet film forming on their outside. When another snowflake crashes into it, they stick together to form a larger snowflake. Then the snowflake grows larger and larger, colliding with other snowflakes. If only light winds are present, these snowflakes stay together on their way to the ground, reaching the size of a silver dollar or larger. The largest snowflake in the world, according to the Guinness Book of Records, fell on a ranch in Fort Keogh, Montana in January 1887. The rancher measured it and saw that its diameter was 38 centimeters, about the size of a Frisbee plate.
Snowflakes can also form graupel, a distinct type of precipitation. Don't be surprised if you've never heard of them because they are often mistaken for hail or sleet. Hail is usually associated with thunderstorms rather than blizzards. In addition, its formation requires upward wind currents blowing at a speed of 100 kilometers per hour or more. A drop of precipitation freezes and an upward flow of air sends it upward, where it collides with a large amount of water, which forms another layer on it. Thus, the hail grows in size until it becomes too heavy to be carried upward by the air current. It can become as big as a golf ball. If you cut it open, you can see rings indicating layers of ice. Another name for sleet is ice pellets, rain that freezes just before it hits the ground.
Krupa, on the other hand, begins its life as a snowflake. As the snowflake falls, it passes through a cloud of supercooled droplets approximately 10 millimeters in diameter. The drop sticks to the snowflake and freezes. The image above is a real dendritic snowflake. A large lumpy ball is attached to its center. These grains tend to remain small and much softer than the icy surface of the hail. They are tiny snowballs that are only suitable for a snowball fight between Jonathan Swift's Lilliputians.
Snow is not always white 
Snow appears white because the complex structure of snowflakes gives it multiple surfaces to reflect light across the color spectrum. What little sunlight a snowflake absorbs is also distributed evenly. Because the visible light spectrum is white, snow appears white to us. In fact, this is why we see most white substances as white. This is due to the unusual way in which they scatter light. Without their complex structure, snowflakes are liquid water or pure ice, which is transparent rather than white.
Snowflakes don't have to be white either. Blue snow is an alternative result of light scattering and absorption. Blue color is more difficult to absorb than other colors and if we look at snow from a distance, we can see blue shades among the white ones.
Photosynthetic algae can also give snow a red, orange, purple, brown or green hue. The most common color is red or pink and is commonly called "watermelon snow" due to its color and sweet taste (although it is not recommended to eat). Snow is known to fall in different colors, usually due to air pollution. In 2007, orange, foul-smelling, oily snow fell in Siberia.
Deadly Snow
There are approximately 105 snow storms in the United States each year, and each storm can produce 39 million tons of snow. This is equivalent to 11,000 Empire State Buildings of snow falling on Americans every year. Is it any wonder that snow storms can cause infrastructure to stop functioning in entire cities?
A 2010 study found that local economies could suffer between $300 million and $700 million in losses due to a single day of infrastructure downtime. And that doesn't even include lost tax revenue. It also does not reflect the cost of snow removal. Missouri spent $1.2 million to salt its roads during one February snowstorm in 2011.
In addition, there is a cost in the form of lives. Since 1936, snowstorms have caused 200 deaths annually. Approximately 70 percent of these deaths are due to automobile accidents. Another 25 percent are the result of overexertion from shoveling snow or pushing cars. The remaining 5 percent comes from roof collapses, house fires, carbon monoxide poisoning from stranded cars, or electrocution from broken power lines.
And that's not even counting blizzards, which depend not on snowfall, but on constant (three hours or more) winds blowing at a speed of at least 56 kilometers per hour. Blizzards do not occur as frequently or as deadly as other extreme weather events such as hurricanes or tornadoes, but not all hurricanes or tornadoes kill people. Unlike almost every snowstorm, which results in loss of life.
In February 1972, Iran suffered a snowstorm that lasted a week. During this time, several villages were covered with an 8-meter layer of snow, because of which all the inhabitants died. The number of deaths has reached 4,000. By comparison, the deadliest tornado in history, which occurred in Bangladesh in 1989, killed 1,300 people.
Giant Snowman
Most of us can't create real snow sculptures. The best we get is three large balls stacked on top of each other with a carrot for a nose and coals for eyes. When we step back to admire our creation, we often wonder who could have done it better. And here is the answer to your question.
The world's largest snow woman was Olympia, 37.2 meters high according to the Guinness Book of Records. She was named after an elderly Maine senator at the time, Olympia Snowe, and the town of Bethel spent a month sculpting the snow woman in 2008. Her eyelashes were made from skis and her eyes were made from giant wreaths. her lips were made of old tires painted red. The snow woman's hands were two 8.2-meter pine trees. To give her style, she was draped with a 30.5-meter scarf, car tires were attached in the form of buttons, and a 2-meter pendant was hung around her neck.
While she may not like to admit it, she weighs 6 million kilograms.
Artificial snow 
People have been attaching wooden planks to their feet and skiing down mountains for the last 4,000 years, but it wasn't until the 1800s that skiing was recognized as a recreational and sporting event. Another 50 years passed before the first snow-making machine was patented. In March 1949, Wayne Pierce, Art Hunt, and Dave Richey attached a soda hose to a spray paint compressor. They demonstrated how water, pushed through a spout, is sprayed onto a mist, allowing it to solidify at higher temperatures.
In 1961, Alden Hanson patented a snow machine that used a fan to shoot snowflakes over long distances. In 1975, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin discovered an even better nucleating agent: a biodegradable protein that helps water form ice crystals. In other words: dirt. As with sand and natural snow, it acted as a catalyst for water to freeze in warm weather. Today, snow machines (“guns”) make snow much the same way Mother Nature does.
When the 2014 Winter Olympics were held in the beach resort of Sochi, Russia, organizers had 500 snowmakers ready to make sure there would be enough snow. The average February temperature in Sochi is 4.4 degrees Celsius. Therefore, just in case, the Olympic Committee stocked up on 710,000 cubic meters of snow taken from the Caucasus Mountains last winter.
In preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Chinese scientists said they had caused the first artificial snowfall over the Tibetan Plateau. In 2007, they shot cigarette-sized sticks of silver iodide into the clouds, causing 1 centimeter of snow to fall. The molecular lattice of silvered iodine is similar to and binds to water, acting like sand to natural snow and freezing the water. China used it again in 2009, hoping to ease the drought around Beijing. It's unclear whether cloud seeding works, mainly because it's hard to prove whether snow was going to come from an incoming cloud anyway.
Of course, sometimes people really need it to snow indoors. This requires artificial snow. One of the easiest ways to create it is to add cold water to sodium polyacrylate. This results in the formation of crystals that look and feel like real snow. Well, where can you find sodium polyacrylate? In disposable diapers. You didn't disobey: every time a baby pees in a diaper, it also makes warm, yellow snow.
It also snows on two planets that are our neighbors in the solar system 
Mars experiences wild temperature fluctuations. If you were standing on the Martian equator, you might slip out of your shoes, but you'd still need a hat. The reason is that the temperature at your feet will be 21 degrees Celsius and at chest level 0 degrees Celsius. That's why you would be able to see the snow on your shoulders, which would disappear before it hit your fingers. In 2008, Mars Lander observed Martian snowfall that evaporated before the snow fell to the ground.
However, Martian snow actually reaches the surface, especially around the poles. The photo above shows the North Pole of Mars. This snow is not water. This is frozen carbon dioxide. The crystals are microscopic, probably the size of red blood cells. They fall out like mist. The dry and powdery particles don't stick together into a snowball, but that would be a skier's dream. In rare cases, water-ice still falls on Mars.
Snow also falls on Venus and is much stranger than Martian snow. It does not consist of water or carbon dioxide. Venusian snow is made of metal.
Venus's lowlands are strewn with pyrite minerals. Along with extreme atmospheric pressure and temperatures of up to 480 degrees Celsius, minerals evaporate and rise into an atmosphere of carbon dioxide. At the higher, colder altitudes atop the great Venusian mountains, a metallic fog shrouds the slopes with bismuth sulfide and lead sulfide, better known as bismuthin and galena.
Science doesn't know whether real snow falls on Venus, but rain has been spotted on its surface. Again, rain on Venus is very different from rain on Earth. It consists of sulfuric acid.
The world's largest snowball fights
Currently, the largest snowball fight in the world is held by the residents of Seattle. Anyone who has lived in the Emerald City knows that in this city it rains much more often than it snows. So when Seattle wanted to sponsor a fundraiser that ended with a legendary snowball fight, they had to bring 34 truckloads (or 74,000 kilograms) of snow from the Cascade Mountains to downtown Seattle, right next to the Space Needle.
Six thousand tickets for the fight were sold online and each ticket holder received a bracelet. On the designated Snow Day, January 12, 2013, 5,834 ticket holders had their wristbands scanned before entering the arena. The arena was roughly divided in half with several snow forts scattered around the perimeter. Some participants brought equipment for making snowballs.
The previous record was held by 5,387 South Koreans who threw more snowballs into the air than at each other. This couldn't happen in Seattle. At 5:30 pm, 130 judges from the Guinness Book of Records surrounded the square and gave the signal for battle. They disqualified those who did not throw a snowball within the next 90 seconds. The video shows huge curtains of flying snowballs. Some participants received scars. At the end of the allotted time, Seattle set a new record. By the end of the day, $50,000 had been raised for the Boys and Girls Club.
The unofficial record for the largest snowball fight belongs to long-dead men. During the Civil War, the two Confederate blocs attacked each other with nothing more than snowballs. Two snowstorms on February 19 and 21, 1863, dropped 43 centimeters of snow on Fredericksburg, Virginia, where General Thomas's II Corps was camped for the winter.
General Robert Hoke's brigade had a friendly rivalry with Colonel William Stiles' 16th. On the morning of February 25, Hawk's five North Carolina regiments attacked Stiles' camp. The Georgians, who mostly comprised Stiles's regiment, fought off the attack and marched on Hawk's camp. Robert Hawk's soldiers were waiting with their sacks filled with snowballs. The melee that followed included approximately 10,000 participants.
The coolest annual snow festival
If you love snow, then there is a place on Earth where you should go. It's so stunning that it can put winter to shame. Every January, nearly 30 million visitors travel to Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang Province in northeast China, to attend the International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival. The average temperature in Harbin is -17 degrees Celsius, and the recorded record temperature is -35 degrees Celsius. Thanks to this, there are all conditions for snow and ice sculptors to create their own designs.
The festival began in 1963 as an ice lantern garden party. It was delayed for decades due to China's Cultural Revolution, but was revived as an annual event in 1985. The festival is sponsored entirely by the Chinese government and lasts about a month, ending with a day dedicated to destroying the sculptures with ice picks.
Ice lanterns are hollowed-out sculptures with a candle inside and are still part of the celebrations, but the crowd wants to see life-size ice buildings and structures. In December 2007, 600 sculptors took part in the construction of the world's largest snow sculpture to open the 2008 festival. The sculpture, called “Romantic Feelings,” reached a height of 35 meters and its length was 200 meters. It included an ice maiden, a cathedral and a Russian-style temple.
For some of us, the winter months present an uninvited guest in the form of endless snow. We will tell you interesting facts about fluffy snow that each of us should know.
Snowflakes are minerals
As water droplets freeze, the water vapor surrounding them condenses on their surface. Because of the V-shaped angle between oxygen and two hydrogen atoms in each water molecule, the molecules attach to each other in a hexagonal shape. Therefore, snowflakes first form as hexagonal prismatic crystals, which are about the size of a dot in a sentence. Prismatic crystals can be slender columns like wooden pencils, flat like six-sided slabs of glass, or anything in between. As more water vapor attaches to them, the columns expand or become needle-like while the plates develop six branches that themselves branch off, eventually forming the familiar, fern-like snowflake shape. A typical snowflake contains 180 billion water molecules. The structure of each snowflake depends on the water available and the temperature with which it interacts. Even snowflakes next to each other form into different shapes. This is why there are virtually no two identical snowflakes. Statistically, this famous fact sounds dubious. Every winter, on average, one septillion (that's 1 followed by 24 zeros) of snowflakes falls from the sky. If we take into account all the winters in the past, it is quite logical to assume that the two snowflakes should have been identical. However, the complexity of snowflakes is so great that their variety is almost endless. And if we consider them atomically, their complexity increases even more. About 1 in 3,000 hydrogen atoms has a neutron in its nucleus, making it heavy hydrogen. These changes in hydrogen are distributed differently in each snowflake and reduce the chances of two identical snowflakes forming to almost zero. Despite their differences, snowflakes are the same in that their molecules adopt an ordered crystal lattice structure. And because they are solid, natural, and inorganic, snow falls into an unexpected classification: minerals. That's right, snow is in the same class as diamonds, sapphires and rubies. If you don't mind keeping your hand in the freezer, then it can probably be set into a ring.Snowflakes begin their lives as grains of sand.
Moisture is, of course, a necessary ingredient in snow. However, water is found everywhere in the atmosphere in the form of vapor and small droplets, and only some of this moisture becomes snow. The catalyst for this process is the condensation nucleus. These nuclei can be anything from certain air pollution to ash from forest fires or volcanic eruptions, or radioactive particles from nuclear explosions. They can also be sea salt, meteorite dust from space, dust from Earth, or pollen. When the atmosphere is too hot or dry, dust and water remain separated. The dust creates an atmospheric haze that can sometimes be seen hanging over large cities in the summer. Water droplets do not freeze instantly when the air temperature drops to 0 degrees Celsius and can remain supercooled down to -40 degrees Celsius. However, when the droplets come into contact with the solid surface of a dust particle, they freeze at much higher temperatures, in some cases temperatures above -6 degrees Celsius. Because each dust particle is different from the others, the droplets freeze at different temperatures.Cereals: falling snow balls
Snowflakes are quite small and when the atmosphere is cold and dry, they remain that way. Dry snow is very annoying for those who like to play snowballs because there is not enough moisture in it for the snow to stick together into snowballs. But when the troposphere is completely or partially warm, snowflakes melt a little, resulting in a wet film forming on their outside. When another snowflake crashes into it, they stick together to form a larger snowflake. Then the snowflake grows larger and larger, colliding with other snowflakes. If only light winds are present, these snowflakes stay together on their way to the ground, reaching the size of a silver dollar or larger. The largest snowflake in the world, according to the Guinness Book of Records, fell on a ranch in Fort Keogh, Montana in January 1887. The rancher measured it and saw that its diameter was 38 centimeters, about the size of a Frisbee plate. Snowflakes can also form graupel, a distinct type of precipitation. Don't be surprised if you've never heard of them because they are often mistaken for hail or sleet. Hail is usually associated with thunderstorms rather than blizzards. In addition, its formation requires upward wind currents blowing at a speed of 100 kilometers per hour or more. A drop of precipitation freezes and an upward flow of air sends it upward, where it collides with a large amount of water, which forms another layer on it. Thus, the hail grows in size until it becomes too heavy to be carried upward by the air current. It can become as big as a golf ball. If you cut it open, you can see rings indicating layers of ice. Another name for sleet is ice pellets, rain that freezes just before it hits the ground. Krupa, on the other hand, begins its life as a snowflake. As the snowflake falls, it passes through a cloud of supercooled droplets approximately 10 millimeters in diameter. The drop sticks to the snowflake and freezes. The image above is a real dendritic snowflake. A large lumpy ball is attached to its center. These grains tend to remain small and much softer than the icy surface of the hail. They are tiny snowballs that are only suitable for a snowball fight between Jonathan Swift's Lilliputians. Snow is not always white
Snow appears white because the complex structure of snowflakes gives it multiple surfaces to reflect light across the color spectrum. What little sunlight a snowflake absorbs is also distributed evenly. Because the visible light spectrum is white, snow appears white to us. In fact, this is why we see most white substances as white. This is due to the unusual way in which they scatter light. Without their complex structure, snowflakes are liquid water or pure ice, which is transparent rather than white. Snowflakes don't have to be white either. Blue snow is an alternative result of light scattering and absorption. Blue color is more difficult to absorb than other colors and if we look at snow from a distance, we can see blue shades among the white ones. Photosynthetic algae can also give snow a red, orange, purple, brown or green hue. The most common color is red or pink and is commonly called "watermelon snow" due to its color and sweet taste (although it is not recommended to eat). Snow is known to fall in different colors, usually due to air pollution. In 2007, orange, foul-smelling, oily snow fell in Siberia. Deadly Snow
There are approximately 105 snow storms in the United States each year, and each storm can produce 39 million tons of snow. This is equivalent to 11,000 Empire State Buildings of snow falling on Americans every year. Is it any wonder that snow storms can cause infrastructure to stop functioning in entire cities? A 2010 study found that local economies could suffer between $300 million and $700 million in losses due to a single day of infrastructure downtime. And that doesn't even include lost tax revenue. It also does not reflect the cost of snow removal. Missouri spent $1.2 million to salt its roads during one February snowstorm in 2011. In addition, there is a cost in the form of lives. Since 1936, snowstorms have caused 200 deaths annually. Approximately 70 percent of these deaths are due to automobile accidents. Another 25 percent are the result of overexertion from shoveling snow or pushing cars. The remaining 5 percent comes from roof collapses, house fires, carbon monoxide poisoning from stranded cars, or electrocution from broken power lines. And that's not even counting blizzards, which depend not on snowfall, but on constant (three hours or more) winds blowing at a speed of at least 56 kilometers per hour. Blizzards do not occur as frequently or as deadly as other extreme weather events such as hurricanes or tornadoes, but not all hurricanes or tornadoes kill people. Unlike almost every snowstorm, which results in loss of life. In February 1972, Iran suffered a snowstorm that lasted a week. During this time, several villages were covered with an 8-meter layer of snow, because of which all the inhabitants died. The number of deaths has reached 4,000. By comparison, the deadliest tornado in history, which occurred in Bangladesh in 1989, killed 1,300 people.Giant Snowman
Most of us can't create real snow sculptures. The best we get is three large balls stacked on top of each other with a carrot for a nose and coals for eyes. When we step back to admire our creation, we often wonder who could have done it better. And here is the answer to your question. The world's largest snow woman was Olympia, 37.2 meters high according to the Guinness Book of Records. She was named after an elderly Maine senator at the time, Olympia Snowe, and the town of Bethel spent a month sculpting the snow woman in 2008. Her eyelashes were made from skis and her eyes were made from giant wreaths. her lips were made of old tires painted red. The snow woman's hands were two 8.2-meter pine trees. To give her style, she was draped with a 30.5-meter scarf, car tires were attached in the form of buttons, and she had a 2-meter pendant hung around her neck, and while she may not like to admit it, she weighs 6 million kilograms. Artificial snow
People have been attaching wooden planks to their feet and skiing down mountains for the last 4,000 years, but it wasn't until the 1800s that skiing was recognized as a recreational and sporting event. Another 50 years passed before the first snow-making machine was patented. In March 1949, Wayne Pierce, Art Hunt, and Dave Richey attached a soda hose to a spray paint compressor. They demonstrated how water, pushed through a spout, is sprayed onto a mist, allowing it to solidify at higher temperatures. In 1961, Alden Hanson patented a snow machine that used a fan to shoot snowflakes over long distances. In 1975, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin discovered an even better nucleating agent: a biodegradable protein that helps water form ice crystals. In other words: dirt. As with sand and natural snow, it acted as a catalyst for water to freeze in warm weather. Today, snow machines (“guns”) make snow much the same way Mother Nature does. When the 2014 Winter Olympics were held in the beach resort of Sochi, Russia, organizers had 500 snowmakers ready to make sure there would be enough snow. The average February temperature in Sochi is 4.4 degrees Celsius. Therefore, just in case, the Olympic Committee stocked up on 710,000 cubic meters of snow taken from the Caucasus Mountains last winter. In preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Chinese scientists said they had caused the first artificial snowfall over the Tibetan Plateau. In 2007, they shot cigarette-sized sticks of silver iodide into the clouds, causing 1 centimeter of snow to fall. The molecular lattice of silvered iodine is similar to and binds to water, acting like sand to natural snow and freezing the water. China used it again in 2009, hoping to ease the drought around Beijing. It's unclear whether cloud seeding works, mainly because it's hard to prove whether snow was going to come from an incoming cloud anyway. Of course, sometimes people really need it to snow indoors. This requires artificial snow. One of the easiest ways to create it is to add cold water to sodium polyacrylate. This results in the formation of crystals that look and feel like real snow. Well, where can you find sodium polyacrylate? In disposable diapers. You didn't disobey: every time a baby pees in a diaper, it also makes warm, yellow snow. It also snows on two planets that are our neighbors in the solar system
Mars experiences wild temperature fluctuations. If you were standing on the Martian equator, you might slip out of your shoes, but you'd still need a hat. The reason is that the temperature at your feet will be 21 degrees Celsius and at chest level 0 degrees Celsius. That's why you would be able to see the snow on your shoulders, which would disappear before it hit your fingers. In 2008, Mars Lander observed Martian snowfall that evaporated before the snow fell to the ground. However, Martian snow actually reaches the surface, especially around the poles. The photo above shows the North Pole of Mars. This snow is not water. This is frozen carbon dioxide. The crystals are microscopic, probably the size of red blood cells. They fall out like mist. The dry and powdery particles don't stick together into a snowball, but that would be a skier's dream. In rare cases, water-ice still falls on Mars. Snow also falls on Venus and is much stranger than Martian snow. It does not consist of water or carbon dioxide. Venusian snow is made of metal. Venus's lowlands are strewn with pyrite minerals. Along with extreme atmospheric pressure and temperatures of up to 480 degrees Celsius, minerals evaporate and rise into an atmosphere of carbon dioxide. At the higher, colder altitudes atop the great Venusian mountains, a metallic fog shrouds the slopes with bismuth sulfide and lead sulfide, better known as bismuthin and galena. Science doesn't know whether real snow falls on Venus, but rain has been spotted on its surface. Again, rain on Venus is very different from rain on Earth. It consists of sulfuric acid. The world's largest snowball fights
Currently, the largest snowball fight in the world is held by the residents of Seattle. Anyone who has lived in the Emerald City knows that in this city it rains much more often than it snows. So when Seattle wanted to sponsor a fundraiser that ended with a legendary snowball fight, they had to bring 34 truckloads (or 74,000 kilograms) of snow from the Cascade Mountains to downtown Seattle, right next to the Space Needle. Six thousand tickets for the fight were sold online and each ticket holder received a bracelet. On the designated Snow Day, January 12, 2013, 5,834 ticket holders had their wristbands scanned before entering the arena. The arena was roughly divided in half with several snow forts scattered around the perimeter. Some participants brought equipment for making snowballs. The previous record was held by 5,387 South Koreans who threw more snowballs into the air than at each other. This couldn't happen in Seattle. At 5:30 pm, 130 judges from the Guinness Book of Records surrounded the square and gave the signal for battle. They disqualified those who did not throw a snowball within the next 90 seconds. The video shows huge curtains of flying snowballs. Some participants received scars. At the end of the allotted time, Seattle set a new record. By the end of the day, $50,000 had been raised for the Boys and Girls Club. The unofficial record for the largest snowball fight belongs to long-dead men. During the Civil War, the two Confederate blocs attacked each other with nothing more than snowballs. Two snowstorms on February 19 and 21, 1863, dropped 43 centimeters of snow on Fredericksburg, Virginia, where General Thomas's II Corps was camped for the winter. General Robert Hoke's brigade had a friendly rivalry with Colonel William Stiles' 16th. On the morning of February 25, Hawk's five North Carolina regiments attacked Stiles' camp. The Georgians, who mostly comprised Stiles's regiment, fought off the attack and marched on Hawk's camp. Robert Hawk's soldiers were waiting with their sacks filled with snowballs. The melee that followed included approximately 10,000 participants.The coolest annual snow festival
If you love snow, then there is a place on Earth where you should go. It's so stunning that it can put winter to shame. Every January, nearly 30 million visitors travel to Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang Province in northeast China, to attend the International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival. The average temperature in Harbin is -17 degrees Celsius, and the recorded record temperature is -35 degrees Celsius. Thanks to this, there are all conditions for snow and ice sculptors to create their own designs. The festival began in 1963 as an ice lantern garden party. It was delayed for decades due to China's Cultural Revolution, but was revived as an annual event in 1985. The festival is sponsored entirely by the Chinese government and lasts about a month, ending with a day dedicated to destroying the sculptures with ice picks. Ice lanterns are hollowed-out sculptures with a candle inside and are still part of the celebrations, but the crowd wants to see life-size ice buildings and structures. In December 2007, 600 sculptors took part in the construction of the world's largest snow sculpture to open the 2008 festival. The sculpture, called “Romantic Feelings,” reached a height of 35 meters and its length was 200 meters. It included an ice maiden, a cathedral and a Russian-style temple.- As you know, snow does not fall all over the globe, because nature took care of the temperature conditions of some countries. This is why most of the people who inhabit our planet have never seen snow in their lives. Maybe from a photograph, or maybe you’ve visited snowy countries.
- Of all the snow that has fallen on the entire globe, there is not a single snowflake that has a repeating structure!
- Snowflakes are 95% air. That is why they fall very slowly, at a speed of 0.9 km/hour.
- Why is snow white? Because snow has air in its structure. In this case, all kinds of light rays are simply reflected from the boundary of ice crystals with air and scattered. But there have been cases in history when snow of a different color fell. For example, black snow fell in Switzerland in 1969, just in time for Christmas, and in 1955 green snow fell in California. The saddest thing in this story is that the residents who tasted this snow died soon, and those who took the green snow in their hands received severe itching and a rash on their hands.
But the snow is not so white everywhere. For example, in Antarctica and high mountains, snow of pink, purple, red and yellowish-brown colors is found. This is facilitated by creatures that live in the snow and are called Chlamydomonas snow. - 1 cm of snow cover, which covers our Earth during the winter, provides a full 25-35 cubic meters of water per 1 hectare of area. Perhaps people will soon come up with some devices for collecting snow and using it in the future. Somewhere in industry, or as process water for irrigating fields, flushing in public toilets, etc. and so on. Or maybe learn to separate water and chemicals in the snow.
- When a snowflake falls into the water, it emits a high-frequency sound that is not detected by humans, but, according to scientists, the fish population of the river really does not like it.
- Snow, under normal conditions, melts at a temperature of 0 degrees Celsius. However, a significant amount of snow can evaporate at sub-zero temperatures without being converted into a liquid phase. This process occurs when the sun's rays hit the snow.
- In the winter season, snow reflects up to 90% of the sun's rays from the Earth's surface, directing them back into space. Thus, preventing the Earth from warming up.
- At temperatures below -2-5 degrees Celsius, a creaking sound is heard when walking in the snow. And the colder the weather, the stronger this creaking is heard. And there are two reasons for this: firstly, the sound appears when snow crystals break, and secondly, when the crystals slide against each other under the pressure that you create.
- The largest snowflake in the entire world has been witnessed in history. During a snowfall in 1987 on January 28 in Fort Coy (Montana, USA), a snowflake found had a diameter of 38 cm. And this despite the fact that ordinary snowflakes have an average diameter of 5 mm.
Now you know more :)
