Short Stuff: Red Snow

Thanks to green algae, there's such a thing as red snow. And we've recently found it can accelerate global warming. Look out!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's chuck this short stuff. That's right, What are you
gonna say? I was saying, yeah, I was wrapping up
my little song. Oh man, can we start over? Sure?
All right? Hey, everybody, welcome to short Stuff. I'm chucked. Hey,
wait a minute, this is going wrong already. All right,

(00:25):
we're here to talk about red snow and this the
origin material here was from our old friends at houstuffworks
dot com and Mark Mancini with his article the Amazing
and Alarming science behind red Snow. Yes, because snow is
not supposed to be red. And when the snow turns red,
you know things have gotten biblical. I thought you were

(00:45):
about to say, like a rhyming. I could have. I
chose not to. Specifically, when the snow turns red. That
means you're not gonna enjoy the future. It's kind of
what that means. I thought it was great. Mark A.
Mancini went to the trouble of saying like, Okay, snow's
normally white, and here's why. And I feel like we

(01:07):
should honor his work by mentioning it to you. Let's
hear it. Why is it white? Oh? Because the crystals
that make up ice or snow scatter all colors on
the visible wavelength, so everything's reflected back as just white.
Because they all mixed together, no color gets absorbed, and
so the snow doesn't seem like blue or red normally.

(01:30):
It can turn red, and it's actually we've known it
turns red once in a while for a very long time.
This is news to me, but apparently as far back
as Pliny the Elder again, yeah, I love that guy.
He was writing from twenty three to seventy nine CE,
and he wrote about red tennant snow as well. Yeah,

(01:51):
I mean Pliny the Elder wrote about red snow. I
think in the in the Middle Ages there were people
talking about red snow. There's a guy named Randall Servenni,
who it looks like Mark might have actually interviewed for
this article. In this Randall wrote a book as a
professor at Arizona State University called Freaks of the Storm,

(02:13):
which is about kind of wacky weather, and there was
a chapter on red snow and he said, you know,
Charles Darwin saw red snow and the Andes Mountains. It
was white and when it turned red as it thawed
and so a lot of like very famous people in
history have been kind of freaked out by seeing this phenomenon.

(02:34):
I don't know at what point we figured this out,
but apparently by the time Darwin was around in the
mid nineteenth century and seeing red snow in the Andes,
he knew what it was. So it like at least
by the mid nineteenth century, we knew that red snow,
it turns out, is actually caused by green algae of

(02:55):
all things. Yeah, and that's you know, we'll get in
after the jump to exactly what's going on there. It
can also you can get like reddish pinkish hues if
like Saharan dust blows like into Europe or something like that.
That's not the kind of red snow we're talking about.
We're talking about and if you see pictures of like

(03:16):
legit red snow and as it melts, red water flows
and waterfalls all over the world, And like you said,
it's green algae specifically, clama dominus nivalis very nice. I
practiced it too. I think you nailed it. Let's hear
your version, clamidinous nivalis. It sounds like we both just

(03:41):
cast a magic spell. Either way, though, I'd love Latin
for that reason. All right, well, let's take an early
break since that's a pseudo cliffhanger. Maybe that's what we
just conjured was a break, and we'll tell you all
about how green algae can turn white snow red right
after this. Okay, So Clomidamnus clemidamnus, Yeah, novalis is a

(04:32):
type of green algae, like we said, but we've been
talking about red snow and the reason. Um well, let
me tell you a little bit more about this green algae. First,
let's hear you get into why it's I've seen it
written about as a cryophilic microu carryote, meaning it loves
the cold, and it's a very tiny u carryote. It's

(04:54):
like La Nina means the Nina, right, it's from Kingdom Plante.
It's a plant, but it's also mobile. It's very very
bizarre in no small part because again it's green, but
and it's a plant, but it lives in high altitude
snowfields like the Arctic or in the Andes Mountains. And

(05:15):
it's green, but it produces a red pigment called asta
zanthon during warm seasons. And here's the crux of everything.
If green algae didn't produce asta zanthon, we probably would
not be talking about it right now. Yeah, that's a
good point. The stuff is pretty interesting. There's a biologist
named Arwin Edwards who I think was also interviewed for

(05:38):
this article, who says that this red pigment xts kind
of like a sunscreen. Yea. It helps protect the organisms
from excessive solar radiation during the warm seasons. And so
what happens is during the wintertime, these organisms go dormant
spring springs, and then they come to the surface and bloom.

(05:59):
But you know, it can't just bloom as in snow
like algae needs like liquid water to bloom. So as
the snow melts, it becomes more of that sort of
wet snow, and that's when the algae release starts blooming.
In the wet snow, those algile cells get going and
they photosynthesize, and this is where that red pigment comes about. Yeah,

(06:22):
and so if you get a bunch of these things together,
and a lot of them can get together a single
millimeter of snow, I guess a cubic melimeter can contain
half a million of these individuals. There's a lot of them,
and when you put a lot of them together, the
snow turns red and not just like, oh, it looks
kind of reddish. Especially when it melts, it is like

(06:46):
a puddle of blood. It looks like basically semi translucent blood.
It's that red. It's pretty cool looking in other words. Yeah,
And there's a problem though with it turning red, because,
like you said, it needs a little bit of melted
snow to start to bloom, to make it to the
surface and start to thrive. But after it gets that
initial foothold, it kind of takes over itself because that

(07:10):
red pigment absorbs way more solar radiation than white snow.
White snow reflects everything, right, so white snow can stay
colder longer. If you've ever seen a snow pile that
got put in the corner of a parking lot in
the Midwest or north and is still there in like May,
that's because that that snow is reflecting back although that

(07:32):
solar radiation or a lot of it. If that was red,
it'd be melted by February, that's the saying. And this
stuff is red, so the more it blooms, the more
it absorbs heat, the more it warms the surrounding snow,
the more the snow melts. Yeah, I mean that that
white car that you have is going to be less
hot than your red car and certainly your black car.

(07:56):
That's why you see so many white cars in hot
places where hot climate, like out in the desert. And
it's the same deal here. So as the stuff turns round,
like you said, it sort of becomes a cycle, a
feedback loop where it starts melting more and more stuff,
and then that in turn, you know, can spread the

(08:16):
algae and all of a sudden you might have a
legit problem on your hands. And Nature magazine thinks that's
the case. In twenty sixteen, they published a report under
the leadership of Stephanie Let's believe from the University of Leeds,
and they're basically saying, hey, there's about a five to
fifteen percent acceleration of glacier melting rates because of this

(08:39):
algae on the surface, because it's darker. Yeah, and we
should say this is not so new freak of nature,
like this has always been going on. The reason that
it's alarming, according to that twenty sixteen paper from Nature
is that, like you just said, they're accelerating snow melt,
and because global temperatures are warming and Arctic snowmelt is

(09:02):
really important to climate change in general, they're saying, like,
we need to take this into effect when we start
making our climate models for glacial melting. And no one
has until or no one did until twenty sixteen. But
their paper was so essentially irrefutable. They did exactly what
they set out to do. Now people start to include

(09:24):
red snow blooms into climate models. Yeah, I mean it's
kind of that simple. It's speeding things up, and they're
including it in those models because it's that that feedback
loop is happening, and you can't just you have to
include all the variables. And this is officially counts as
a variable. Yes, So yeah, you couldn't make a prediction

(09:46):
of like what kind of glacial melt you're going to
see as the temperature warms without taking that into account.
It might they might melt way faster, fifteen percent faster
than you would account for, and your sea wall wouldn't
be built in time. So ts for you. You should
have taken red snow into account. That's right. One find
a little button on this thanks to mister Mancini. We

(10:08):
now have learned that apparently this algae smells like watermelon.
I think who they interviewed said that they didn't smell
it themselves, but there are people that have reported this
red pigment off gas is a water melanie like smell. Yes,
but Mark Mancini warns, don't eat it. Yeah, apparently the

(10:32):
people have eaten it and have blamed red snow for
gastric problems, and that's just not correct. It's probably something
else in the snow. But don't eat it anyway. Yeah,
don't eat the yellow snow. That's what Frank Zappa said. Ye,
and don't eat the red snow because we told you
by way of our friends at holstuffworks dot com. That's
the Chuck Bryant corollary. That's right. Uh, well, Chuck said,

(10:56):
that's right. Everybody that means short stuff is out. Stuff
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