98 Fun Facts About Snow

Snow crystals form when tiny supercooled cloud droplets freeze around what?

Atmospheric particles such as dust give each droplet something to freeze onto, which is why cloud seeding releases silver iodide particles to try to coax out more snow.

Ice is clear, so why does snow look white?

Light scatters off the crystal facets and imperfections, bouncing every colour back about equally, which is the same reason a pile of crushed glass looks white.

What mainly decides the shape a falling snowflake grows into?

Temperature and humidity shift along each flake's fall and alter how water molecules attach, which is why no two snowflakes are likely to grow exactly alike.

Which Vermont farmer began photographing snowflakes under a microscope in 1885, revealing their variety?

Wilson Bentley, nicknamed 'Snowflake' Bentley, died of pneumonia in 1931, which he may have caught while walking home through a snowstorm.

What gives the pink 'watermelon snow' seen on summer mountains its colour?

Algae that thrive in the cold carry a red pigment, and by darkening the snow they help it melt faster around them.

Whose 1611 paper 'On the six-cornered snowflake' first stated a conjecture on stacking spheres?

Johannes Kepler wrote it as a New Year's gift, and his hunch that spheres stacked like cannonballs pack most tightly was only formally proved, by computer, in 2014.

The world's largest snowflake, 38 cm across per Guinness, fell in 1887 in which US state?

Montana's giant flake is only a claim: it lies far outside the few-inch widths reliably documented for other big flakes.

The 1,140-inch single-season snowfall record of 1998-99 was set at a ski area named after which mountain?

Mount Baker gave the ski area its name, but the resort sits about 9 miles from the volcano itself, closer to neighbouring Mount Shuksan.

Which city at the northern tip of Honshu topped AccuWeather's 2016 ranking of the world's snowiest major cities?

Aomori is buried each winter because frigid Siberian winds cross the warmer sea, gather moisture and then drop it as heavy snow over the coast and mountains.

What does a US storm need to be classed as a blizzard?

Strong wind and poor visibility define it: winds of 35 mph or more and visibility under a quarter mile for at least 3 hours, even if the snow is only blowing, not falling.

The Great Blizzard of 1888 helped push which city to build America's first underground subway?

Boston opened the nation's first subway in 1897, and the same storm that cut the region's telegraph lines also pushed cities to bury their wires underground.

At JFK's 1961 inauguration, glare off fresh snow stopped which poet from reading his new poem?

Robert Frost, then 86, could not make out his typed pages, so he recited 'The Gift Outright', a poem published years earlier, from memory instead.

Which type of avalanche causes most avalanche deaths?

Slab avalanches break away as a cohesive block, and in about 90 percent of avalanche incidents the victim or someone in their party triggers the slide.

In December 1916, avalanches buried soldiers in the Alps on the World War I front between Austria-Hungary and which country?

Italy's front with Austria-Hungary ran through high mountains, and some reports say both sides fired shells into the heavy snow on purpose to bury the enemy.

The deadliest avalanche in US history killed 96 people in 1910 in the town of Wellington in which state?

Washington's railway town of Wellington was quietly renamed Tye afterwards, as the Great Northern Railway tried to bury the bad publicity along with the disaster.

In December 2016, photos showed snow on orange dunes near Aïn Séfra in which desert?

The Sahara meets the Atlas Mountains at Aïn Séfra, where winter nights can fall below freezing, yet the rare 2016 snow on its dunes melted within about a day.

In the harsh winter of 1511, which city was filled with more than 100 snow sculptures, many of them satirical?

Brussels was so full of snow figures, caricatures among them, that the town poet Jan Smeken wrote a poem describing them.

Which Renaissance artist was commissioned by Piero de' Medici to build a snowman in 1494?

Michelangelo had gone home to his father's house after Lorenzo de' Medici died, and the snow statue commissioned by Lorenzo's heir Piero brought him back to the Medici court.

The world's tallest snow figure, a 122-foot snowwoman named Olympia, was built in 2008 in Bethel, in which state?

Maine's senator Olympia Snowe gave the snowwoman her name, and she outgrew Angus, the town's 1999 record snowman named for Governor Angus King.

What brings Frosty the Snowman to life in the 1950 song?

A silk hat the children place on his head brings him to life, and the song was written to follow Gene Autry's huge 1949 success with 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer'.

The Austrian who patented the snow globe, Erwin Perzy, was originally trying to build what?

A brighter surgical lamp was his aim, but the particles he added to a water-filled glass globe drifted like falling snow, so he put a small model of Mariazell's basilica inside.

Which 1941 film opens with its dying protagonist dropping a snow globe as he whispers 'Rosebud'?

Citizen Kane never lets its reporter find out what Rosebud means, but the final scene shows the audience the name on the childhood sled Kane had been playing on, as it burns.

What makes snow a good material for keeping an igloo warm?

Trapped air pockets make it an insulator, and builders could briefly heat the inside with a lamp so the walls melted slightly and refroze into a strengthening layer of ice.

In the Inuit languages, the word iglu can refer to what?

A home of any material can be an iglu, because the word simply means 'house', but English borrowed it only for the dome built from blocks of snow.

On which US state's capitol grounds was the record for most simultaneous snow angels (8,962) set in 2007?

North Dakota was winning its own record back: the state set the first mark in 2002, lost it to a university crowd in 2006, then answered with 8,962 people in Bismarck.

The word 'ski' goes back to an Old Norse word that literally meant what?

Stick of wood was the literal sense of Old Norse skíð, and the early English spelling 'skee' lives on in Skee-Ball, the arcade game named for its ski-jump ramp.

The first Winter Olympic Games were held in 1924 in which French town?

Chamonix staged it as an 'International Winter Sports Week', and only afterwards did the IOC decide, in retrospect, to count the event as the first Winter Olympics.

Snowboarding became an official Olympic sport at which Winter Games?

Nagano 1998 crowned snowboarding's first Olympic champion, Canada's Ross Rebagliati, who then nearly lost his gold medal after testing positive for marijuana.

The Snurfer, the snowboard's forerunner, was invented in 1965 in Muskegon, in which state?

Michigan's Sherman Poppen strapped two skis together to entertain his daughters on Christmas Day, and snurfer Jake Burton Carpenter later improved the design.

What does a sleeping snow leopard use as a blanket against the cold?

Its thick tail does double duty: besides serving as a blanket in the cold, it helps the cat balance on the steep, rocky slopes where it hunts.

The snowy owl's breeding success is closely tied to the population of which small Arctic rodent?

Lemmings set the pace: snowy owls lay more eggs when prey is plentiful, and after a good breeding year large numbers of young owls can turn up far to the south in winter.

Which snowy owls come closest to pure white?

Old males are the whitest: males start out flecked like females and whiten as they mature, while young females are the most heavily marked.

The claim that 'Eskimos have dozens of words for snow' traces to a 1911 observation by which anthropologist?

Franz Boas gave just four snow roots, such as aput for snow on the ground and qana for falling snow, and later writers, starting with Benjamin Lee Whorf in 1940, inflated the count.

Disney's Frozen (2013) was loosely inspired by which Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale?

The Snow Queen, Elsa, was the villain in early drafts, until the songwriters wrote 'Let It Go' and it helped turn her into a frightened, sympathetic heroine instead.

Which Irving Berlin song, first sung by Bing Crosby on the radio in 1941, is the best-selling physical single of all time?

White Christmas sold so heavily that Decca's original 1942 master wore out, so Crosby re-recorded it in 1947, and that version is the one most often heard today.

The words flurry, shower, storm and blizzard describe snow events in what kind of order?

Progressively greater duration and intensity is the usual ladder, but a snow squall breaks it: often over within the hour, its sudden whiteouts make it a notorious cause of road crashes.

What do scientists call the depth of water a snow layer would leave if fully melted?

Snow water equivalent matters because depth alone misleads: one snowfall can hold many times more water than another of the same depth.

Which word, shared with geology, names the way a snowpack's crystals change over time?

Metamorphism doesn't always strengthen snow: a strong temperature gradient in the snowpack can grow angular crystals that bond poorly, raising avalanche risk.

Which region was awarded the 2030 Winter Olympics?

The French Alps Games will drop Nordic combined, a sport that had been on the programme at every Winter Olympics since the first in 1924.

Why do the very steepest mountain faces rarely produce big avalanches?

Snow sheds before building up there, running off in small, frequent slides, which is why most avalanches start on slopes of roughly 30 to 45 degrees instead.

In the Snowball Earth hypothesis, what finally thawed the frozen planet?

Volcanic carbon dioxide kept accumulating because the freeze stalled the rock weathering that normally removes it, until a greenhouse surge melted the ice.

Quebec inventor Joseph-Armand Bombardier is best known for which winter invention?

The snowmobile work gained new urgency after his two-year-old son died in the winter of 1934, when the family couldn't get him to a hospital in time.

Which physicist grew the first artificial snow crystal in 1936, in Hokkaido?

Ukichiro Nakaya's first attempts grew only frosty clumps on cotton string, and he succeeded when he tried the tip of a single rabbit hair instead.

What are the tall, blade-like spires of snow and ice that form in dry air at high altitude called?

Penitentes aren't only found on Earth: NASA's New Horizons spacecraft spotted bladed terrain on Pluto that scientists think is made of penitentes hundreds of metres tall.

What is the name for snow that has persisted for several years, denser than névé but not yet glacial ice?

Firn still lets air escape, but once it compacts into glacial ice the remaining air is sealed in bubbles, which is how ice cores preserve samples of ancient atmosphere.

Besides Antarctica, which landmass is covered by one of Earth's two current ice sheets?

Greenland's ice sheet covers about 80 percent of the island, and melting all of it would raise global sea level by about 7.4 metres.

Regions that regularly receive lake-effect snow, such as areas east of the Great Lakes, are called what?

Snowbelts sit downwind of the lakes, where cold air that picked up warmth and moisture over unfrozen lake water rises and drops heavy snow on the shore.

What is the armchair-shaped mountain hollow where snow collects and a glacier forms called?

A cirque often holds a small lake called a tarn once its glacier retreats, and the same hollow also goes by the names corrie and cwm.

Which US state, admitted during the Civil War, has a name that is Spanish for 'snow-covered'?

Nevada means 'snowy' in Spanish, yet it is the driest state in the country; the name came by way of 'Sierra Nevada', meaning a snowy mountain range.

Which seasonal standard did Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne write during a July 1945 heat wave?

Let It Snow topped the charts for Vaughn Monroe that winter, even though its words never once mention a holiday.

In January 1977, which Florida city saw snow fall for the first time since its records began?

Miami woke on January 19 to flurries drifting past its palm trees, part of a cold wave that reached as far south as Homestead and ruined about a third of the state's citrus crop.

On which world did NASA's Phoenix lander use a laser to detect snow falling from clouds in 2008?

Mars surprised the mission team: Phoenix's laser instrument caught snow drifting down from high cirrus clouds, which nobody knew happened there.

Which creature of Sherpa folklore did a Calcutta journalist dub the Abominable Snowman in 1921?

Yeti got its Western nickname from a mistranslation: columnist Henry Newman rendered a porters' word for the creature as 'filthy', then swapped in 'abominable'.

Which monkeys, nicknamed snow monkeys, soak in the hot springs of Japan's Jigokudani park?

Macaques in Japan live farther north, and in a colder climate, than any other primate except humans, with snow on the ground for months of the year.

Which snowman, voiced by Josh Gad in Disney's Frozen, dreams of basking in the heat of summer?

Olaf was first written as one of a legion of snowman guards at Elsa's castle, until the filmmakers decided the henchman idea was not working.

Which dog breed did monks at a Swiss mountain hospice raise to rescue travellers lost in snow?

The St. Bernard named Barry reportedly saved at least 40 people at the pass, and his preserved body is on display in a museum in Bern.

Which desert city has a snowy indoor ski resort with live penguins inside the Mall of the Emirates?

Dubai opened the resort in 2005 with an 85-metre indoor mountain and five slopes, all kept between about −1 and 2 °C while the desert bakes outside.

Poliʻahu, a snow goddess said to live atop a dormant volcano, belongs to which US state's mythology?

Hawaii really does see snow: Mauna Kea means 'white mountain' for its seasonal snow cap, and legend has Poliʻahu freezing the lava of her rival Pele.

Which US state has a town called Snowflake, named for its founders Erastus Snow and William Flake?

Arizona's Snowflake was founded in 1878 by two Mormon pioneers, and the name simply joins their surnames rather than describing the weather.

Snow fell on Albany, New York, in June 1816 after which Indonesian mountain erupted?

Tambora's 1815 blast led to the 'Year Without a Summer', dropping temperatures enough to kill crops and bring midsummer freezes to the northeastern United States.

The snowshoe hare, named for its big furry hind feet, is the main prey of which wild cat?

Lynx numbers rise and fall in step with the hare's, a cycle revealed by decades of Hudson's Bay Company fur records and taught to biology students worldwide.

Which sled dog, honoured with a Central Park statue, led the final leg of Alaska's 1925 serum run?

Balto took the glory, but another husky, Togo, covered a far greater distance over the most dangerous parts of the trail carrying the diphtheria antitoxin.

Which American author wrote the 1936 short story 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro' after an African safari?

Ernest Hemingway opens the story with the frozen carcass of a leopard lying near the summit, and Gregory Peck starred in the 1952 film version.

Which Japanese city's Snow Festival began in 1950 when local teenagers built statues in a park?

Sapporo's festival turned monumental in 1955, when Japan's Self-Defense Forces joined in and built the first massive sculptures as a training exercise.

Which US president popularised the nickname 'Snowmageddon' as a blizzard shut the federal government?

Barack Obama used the word at a Democratic meeting in February 2010, days after a newspaper weather blog had tried it out in a reader poll.

Which pioneer wagon train spent the winter of 1846–47 trapped by snow near California's Truckee Lake?

The Donner Party set out with 87 members and only 48 survived, some by resorting to cannibalism; the lake was later renamed after the group.

Snegurochka, the Snow Maiden who helps hand out New Year gifts, comes from which country's folklore?

Russia's Snow Maiden is cast as the granddaughter of the gift-bringer Ded Moroz, and Rimsky-Korsakov turned her fairy tale into an opera.

Which far-northern predator gives birth in midwinter inside a den the mother digs under the snow?

Polar bear mothers usually have two cubs and stay hidden with them until late winter, when the youngsters are strong enough to walk beside her.

Which Winter Olympic sport combines cross-country skiing with stops to shoot a rifle at targets?

Biathlon grew out of Norwegian military ski contests, and in most races each missed target costs the racer a 150-metre penalty loop.

Which Alaskan town on the Bering Sea coast is the finish line of the Iditarod sled dog race?

Nome lies nearly 1,000 miles of trail from the start; the first winner in 1973 took just over 20 days, and winning times have since fallen below 10.

Sap from which tree is boiled and poured onto packed snow to make taffy at Canadian sugar shacks?

Maple sap boiled just past the syrup stage sets into chewy taffy the moment it hits the snow, a treat known in the United States as sugar on snow.

Which British illustrator's wordless picture book The Snowman became a 1982 animated film?

Raymond Briggs drew the gentle story as a relief after two years buried in the muck and slime of Fungus the Bogeyman, and the film has no dialogue beyond its one song.

Which author-illustrator won the 1963 Caldecott Medal for The Snowy Day, about a boy named Peter?

Ezra Jack Keats made it the first picture book with an African American hero to win a major children's award, building the art from cut paper, fabric and oilcloth.

A North American snow day is called mainly when which daily service cannot run safely?

School buses are the main test, along with the danger to children who walk; when a district uses up its allotted snow days, it usually makes up the extras later in the year.

Snowdon, whose Old English name means 'snow hill', is the highest mountain in which country?

Wales has run a rack railway to the top of the peak since 1896, and in Welsh the mountain is called Yr Wyddfa.

Which Asian mountain range takes its name from Sanskrit words meaning 'abode of snow'?

The Himalayas and their neighbouring ranges hold the third-largest store of ice and snow on Earth, which is why the region is sometimes called the 'Third Pole'.

Snow blindness, caused by ultraviolet glare off snowfields, is a sunburn of which part of the eye?

The cornea is what Inuit snow goggles protect: carved to fit the face from materials such as caribou antler, they admit light only through narrow slits.

In American usage, what are the ice pellets formed when falling snowflakes melt and refreeze called?

Sleet means something different across the Atlantic: in Britain the word describes a wet mix of rain and snow rather than frozen pellets.

Fresh snow bounces back about 90% of incoming sunlight; what do scientists call this reflectivity?

Albedo comes from the Latin for 'whiteness' and runs from 0 for a perfect absorber to 1 for a perfect reflector; charcoal scores about 0.04.

Which warm, dry wind off the Rockies do the Blackfoot call the 'snow eater'?

A strong Chinook can make a foot of snow almost vanish in a day, and it takes its name from a people of the lower Columbia River.

The Blizzard of 1978, which buried Rhode Island and Massachusetts, was which kind of storm?

A nor'easter is named for its winds, which blow in from the northeast; a typical one brings six to twelve hours of steady snow, but the 1978 storm kept going for 33.

Which overhanging ledge of wind-packed snow on a ridge shares its name with a moulding atop a building?

A cornice builds outward as wind drives snow over a crest, and it can break off well back from the edge, which makes it one of mountaineering's classic traps.

Which American village hosted the 1980 Winter Olympics, the first Games to use artificial snow?

Lake Placid's Games also produced the 'Miracle on Ice', when a young US hockey team beat the heavily favoured Soviets on the way to gold.

Which city in China's far northeast hosts the world's largest ice and snow festival each winter?

Harbin's builders saw blocks of ice from the frozen Songhua River and stack them into full-size illuminated buildings.

Which Swiss city burns a snowman effigy called the Böögg each spring to forecast the summer weather?

Zurich packs the Böögg with explosives, and tradition says the sooner its head blows off, the warmer and sunnier the summer will be.

In the Winter War of 1939–40, which country's ski troops in snow camouflage harried the Red Army?

Finland's skiers were almost invisible in their snow capes, and they chopped road-bound Soviet columns into encircled groups they called motti, a word for a stack of firewood.

The deadliest blizzard on record buried entire villages under metres of snow in which country in 1972?

Iran's week of storms dropped as much as 7.9 metres of snow in the south, and some villages were left without a single survivor.

Which Winter Olympic host city had soldiers truck in snow from the Brenner Pass and spread it by hand?

Innsbruck was so short of snow in 1964 that thousands of Austrian troops hauled in 40,000 cubic metres of it, along with 20,000 blocks of ice for the sled runs.

Voles and shrews stay active all winter in which sheltered zone between the snowpack and the ground?

Subnivean comes from the Latin for 'under snow', and once the pack is about 15 cm deep this hidden layer stays close to freezing however cold the air above.

Which sled takes its name from an Algonquian word for a hand-hauled cargo sledge of bark or hide?

Toboggan entered English when colonists on Algonquian lands borrowed the word for their own low wooden sledges, which slide on a flat base with no runners.

Which comedian plays TV weatherman Tom Brandston in the 2000 Nickelodeon film Snow Day?

Chevy Chase's forecaster spends the film feuding with a smug rival from another station, while his children seize their surprise day off.

Which Flemish master painted The Hunters in the Snow, a 1565 scene of men and dogs trudging home?

Bruegel made it one of a series showing the times of the year, five of which survive, and it hangs in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Which Turkish author wrote the 2002 novel Snow, set in the eastern city of Kars?

Orhan Pamuk plays on words throughout: the hero is a poet called Ka, the Turkish title is Kar, meaning snow, and the setting is Kars.

Which festive film classic replaced Hollywood's noisy cornflake snow with a quiet new foam mixture?

It's a Wonderful Life got its 'chemical snow' from RKO's effects chief, who blended foamite, soap flakes, sugar and water; cornflakes had been so loud that dialogue needed redubbing.

Which Japanese author of Snow Country, a tale of a hot-spring geisha, won the 1968 Nobel Prize?

Yasunari Kawabata was the first Japanese writer to win the prize, and he spent years reworking the novel, publishing new chapters in separate journals.

Which Canadian province names the fast-moving 'clipper' storms that sweep snow across the US Midwest?

Alberta supplies the starting point and 19th-century clipper ships the speed; rarer cousins get nicknames like the Saskatchewan screamer and the Manitoba mauler.

Which upstate New York city won the Golden Snowball Award for most snowfall nine winters in a row?

Syracuse's streak ran from the 2002–03 season, when a website revived the lapsed contest, through 2010–11, before Rochester finally broke it.

What nickname is given to northern retirees who migrate to the Sun Belt for the winter?

Snowbirds share their name with the aerobatic display team of the Royal Canadian Air Force and with a song made famous by Anne Murray.