December 31, 2015 • 52 mins
Sure, snow is one of those amazing natural wonders that we so often take for granted, but this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind is more concerned with the weirder corners of our winter wonderland. We're talking pink snow, black snow, blood snow, blue snow, alien snow, conspiracy theory snow and giant snow. Join Robert and Joe as they plunge knee-deep in the weird flaky stuff.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stop
Work dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Brown, and I'm showing the format.
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(01:09):
All right, Joe, let's get going on the topic here today.
We're talking about snow because we are in the midst
of winter of some sort where we are highly unlikely
to see snow, because, let's face it, we live in
Atlanta and it's not unusual to have a d degree
days in December. Yes, most of my snow these days
is coming in the form of storytelling and storybook reading
(01:31):
with my son, particularly the Doctor Seuss book The Cat
in the Hat Comes Back. Are you familiar with this
text at all? I don't think so. No. Now was
this written this one in Alexander Sultan Itsen? No? No,
this was Dr sus is Doctor Sears? Okay, the Cat
in the Hat comes back? Does he come back for revenge? Um? Depended,
(01:51):
you know, it depends on your read of Cat in
the Hat and what cat and what this hat cat
wants out of its visits. This is, of course, the
sequel to The Cat in the Hat. You might remember
that one is the adventure in which the cat shows
up on a rainy day and starts causing a mess,
brings in Thing one and Thing two, and they run
him up and then Eventually they have to catch thing
(02:12):
and the thing one and thing too and uh, Sally
and her brother get the cat out, get the place
cleaned up, just in the nick of time. But they've
effectively staved off boredom, so it's not a total loss. Yeah, indeed.
But in the sequel, this is what's happening. It's a
snow day. There's snow everywhere, and Sally and her brother
are outside cleaning up the snow and her mother is
(02:33):
that their mothers who knows where, but they're at home
doing chores. Cat and Hat shows up, goes in the house,
and the brother instantly thinks, well, this is no good.
I'm going in. I'm gonna check this out and make
sure the cat's not racking the place like he did
last time. Because the cat and Hat is a is
an agent of chaos, and I don't think he's I
don't think he's good or bad, but he brings chaos
(02:54):
to wherever he goes. He's kind of a low key figure, yeah, exactly.
He's a trickster god. And in this particular incident, the
first name the cat does is start eating pink cake
in the bathtub, which is which looks very fun and inviting,
you know the book, uh, and the boy he says,
all right, the brothers says, there, you gotta get out
of there. This is making a mess, and indeed it
(03:15):
makes a pink ring in the tub when he drains it.
So the cat in the hats thing is has always
been that he's gonna help clean up because he's responsible.
But his cleanup techniques tend to be a bit chaotic
as well, and in this case it is kind of
an Amelia Badelia. Right. Yeah, even the well meaning attempts
to fix things sort of cause more chaos, right, and
(03:36):
his methods are are strange, And in this case it's
not it's not a situation where you just all right, well,
let's wash off the tub like a normal person would.
The cat transfers the pink stain from one item to
another in the house, so it goes everywhere until it
eventually winds up on the father's bed and he has
to call in all these additional hat cats, these increasingly
smaller cat in the hats from under his hat. With
(04:00):
each one has a different letter of the alphabet is
its name, So eventually you just have all there's a
whole bunch of different sized hat cats working to destroy
the stain, which eventually ends up outside the house, staining
all of the snow. Uh. And they keep trying harder
and harder, they keep pulverizing the snow, but it remains pink.
(04:20):
It's only when the very smallest hat cat of all
hat cat z, a cat that is so small that
we we are told we cannot actually see it, that
cat takes off his hat and inside that is something
called voom, and zoom cleans up all the snow, makes
it white again. But what is voom? I don't know.
That's the That's that's a question that I want our
(04:42):
listeners to keep in mind. Two questions. A what is
this pink snow exactly that Sally and her brother and
the hat cats are dealing with. And indeed, what is voom? What?
What is this uh this strange substance or or mo
molecule or or energy within the the hat cats these
(05:04):
hat what is it? And how does it clean up
that snow? It's MINTI Glorean's it might be well. Obviously,
the cat and the hat comes back is just a
delightful children's fantasy, But there are a lot of strange
facts and strange circumstances in which people have encountered quite
bizarre snow events in the real world. I don't know
(05:26):
about Boom, but pink snow is not just a dream.
It's a fact about reality. It happens sometimes for various
causes and in various locations, and not just pink. We've
seen black snow, green snow, blue snow, we've seen We've
seen weird snow sculptures that seem not to have been
(05:46):
made by humans or animals. We've seen snow that some
people think isn't actually made of water and it's maybe
some kind of like nano robot army invading the world.
So so I thought it would be worth doing an
episode just to talk about out all of the weird
ways that that snow can freak people out. Indeed, indeed,
so let's you know, one one way that that a
(06:09):
natural phenomena intends to freak us out is when it's
it's size is different, you know, I mean, that's the
whole thing. Nobody cares about seeing a rat, but if
you see a giant rat, and well that's worth talking about.
How about giant snowflakes? Yeah, you know, snowflakes are not
like scorpions, whereas with a scorpion, a giant scorpion, that's
(06:30):
really interesting. But even a normal size, very small scorpion
is worth your attention. How big does a snowflake have
to get before you actually stop and take notice? Well,
that's a good question. So obviously a normal size I
don't know what what what a normal size would be?
Maybe a couple of millimeters or so for a snowflake
that that's not worth your attention. If it were a
(06:50):
few inches across, that would be something you'd notice, right, Um,
And it turns out that that does happen sometimes. Now,
the biggest on record is one where the record itself
is highly disputable. The traditional record holder for for the
biggest snowflake was supposedly observed by a rancher named Matt
(07:11):
Coleman of Fort Keo, Montana in eighteen seven. That is
big sky country, right, oh is it? I think so?
In the Montana big sky count I don't know. I mean,
if there's bigger sky or the bigger snowflakes, I would
guess so that that seems to be the relationship going
on here. Well, let's hear what Matt had to say
about what happened on a ranch. According to Matt, there
were snowflakes that were falling that were bigger than a
(07:33):
milk pan. Yeah, so they were fifteen inches wide and
eight inches thick. So you've got these like frisbee sized
snow Yeah, that's like a that's like a pizza. And
also one of the things you'd have to imagine is
that a snowflake of that size would have enough density
with the ice crystal within it that it would be
(07:54):
falling pretty fast and pretty hard. This is certainly something
that's true. Larger snowflake tend to fall faster. Uh, those
snowflakes that are several inches across will fall faster than
you know, light fluffy, tiny little thing. So I don't
know what it would be like to stand under a
snowflake that's fifteen inches wide. I mean, would that be
like a giant Ninja star coming from this guy to
(08:16):
kill you? I mean it almost sounds like like a
spiritual experience. It's like like seeing an alien life form
or an angelic visitation is occurring in your life, right, Yeah, yeah,
death frisbees from heaven. But anyway, fifteen inches wide, I
don't somehow, I don't believe Matt the Rancher. I think
Matt the Rancher may have been exaggerating. That's just my
(08:38):
gut feeling. It could be wrong. Apparently this guy's word
was good enough for the Guinness Book of World Records.
But I mean, it's not like they sent a team
of investigators out there to verify it and they measured
the snowflake and everything. I think we're pretty much just
going on what this guy said he saw. Okay, and
I can easily imagine a rancher out in the middle
of nowhere in Montana and have you think kind of
(09:00):
looks the same. After a few days, the mind begins
the sort of non itself a little bit, and then
in the midst of a snowstorm, you are visited by this, uh,
this geometric entity, right Thor's and Ninja stars. Yeah, you
call up Guinnis and they write it down because they
need to push some coffees. Okay, So, and I don't
(09:22):
know about fifteen inches, but it's definitely true that that
snowflakes several inches across happened sometimes around the world, and
that's freaky enough on its own. YEA, if I saw
a snowflake three or four inches across, I would think
the Odin's sleep was dawning, Yeah, or that I was
shrinking one of the two. That's a good way of
looking at it too, But of course that's not the
only way that snow can do something physically very strange
(09:46):
with without having anybody mess with it. Yeah, and this
was something I had I had not heard of before.
This was a new one when you brought this up
to this episode. Yeah. So I want to put you
in a scenario. Imagine you are out hiking in the
rocky mountains on New Year's Day. You're a little bit hungover,
You've got your rifle across your back, You've got your
(10:07):
snow shoes on your feet, and you've got your VHS
camcorder with the cracked lens and it's fully charged up
on battery power. Because today is the day you are
finally going to capture video evidence of Bigfoot. Well, you know,
that is my New Year's resolution for the coming year,
just finally, you know, quit talking about it and just
get some video footage of of the of the SAT squad.
(10:29):
Put up or shut up, It's the ultimate personal betterment.
But anyway, you're you're snow shoeing alone through a desolate
mountain pass and suddenly you come out of the pines
into this pristine, snow covered clearing and you look out
beyond the path and you see something very strange. You
see dozens of white cylinders lying on the ground on
(10:50):
their side, each between about like one and two feet tall,
And the best way to describe it is that it
looks like someone has taken a flyer layer of snow
and rolled it up like you might roll up a
flat sheet of pastry into a cinnamon roll. And sometimes
it's this solid, spiraling cylinder like the cinnamon roll, and
(11:12):
sometimes it's more like a doughnut. There's a hole in
the middle, making it look like a white car tire
or one description I've read, a gigantic white cheerio just
sitting there in the snow. And you look around and
there are no footprints anywhere, no indication that anyone has
created these giant icy spirals, unless, of course sasquatch has
(11:36):
wings now, and you know that's how he did it.
But what's going on here? Well, I read an article
where a guy named Mike Stanford had an experience like
this in two thousand seven. He wasn't hunting sasquatch, No
no rifle or VHS cam quarter. But in a two
thousand seven article for the Seattle Times, the author Susan
(11:56):
Gilmour speaks to Stanford, who's this avalanche control role expert
for the Washington State Department of Transportation. That sounds like
a pretty cool job, by the way. Yeah, plus sounds
like he's an ideal person to start thinking about this phenomenon,
right because the movement of snow, the physics of snow
that's right up is out. So while uh, Stanford was
out doing avalanche control work in the North Cascades in
(12:20):
March two thousand and seven, he came across these giant
doughnuts made of snow in a place called Washington Pass,
and the biggest ones were like two ft tall, with
a hole in the middle that he claimed was big
enough for him to fit his head through. I don't
know if that means he actually stuck his head all
the way through it, he said, he put his face
up to it. It does give me an idea to
(12:42):
write a horror story with this great novel execution device,
which would be the ice Gia team. Oh man, that yeah,
don't stick your head into one of these. That was
I mean, even if it's just two ft tall, it's
just uh yeah. I mean, we don't typically want to
be an alarmist on this podcast, but but just played
on the safe side, don't stick your head in, you know,
(13:03):
if you encounter some alien looking ice sore snow sculpture
out in the middle of nowhere, because yeah, this I think,
you know. Back to your question, like, how would I
respond to this, I think I would. I would be
a little freaked out by it, especially since, as I stated,
I was not familiar with this phenomena until you mentioned
it to me. Yeah, well I would pretty obviously. I
(13:24):
mean I've read about it now. But before I had
read about it, I would think someone had made these. Yeah,
I would think ice cannibals that are waiting on me to,
you know, to look at their holy structures or perhaps
I scull them scat and therefore I need to be
aware that there's a giant creature of ice in my vicinity, right.
But no, they are not made by humans or by animals.
(13:45):
That they're very rare, but they've been sighted and photographed
all over the place everywhere, from the mountains to the
prairies on very special occasions, because they're they're just one
of those weird byproducts of the naked laws of physics
when all the variables are just right, and they really
do have to be just right. These things don't happen
very often. But here here's what you do. Oh, by
(14:08):
the way, the name of them, people call them snow rollers,
that's the most common. Also snow donuts, but the snow rollers.
So to get one, you start on the bottom with
a hard crusty surface of ice or solid snow. Uh
And it's it's supposed to be hard and crusty so
that the new falling snow doesn't stick to it very well.
(14:28):
So you've got this hard, crusty surface and then looser,
relatively wet snow piling up on top of the hard layer.
And then you add a force like gravity or just
the right kind of wind, and whichever one it is.
If it's gravity pulling it down along a slope or
wind blowing it across the side, there begins to be
(14:50):
a lateral movement across the ground and it scoops up
the layers of the looser, denser snow, which sticks to
itself but doesn't stick to the harder layer benea it
starts to roll up along the surface of the hard layer,
keeps picking up more loose snow as it goes, and
it essentially is a self forming snowball, like like you'd
(15:10):
used to make a snowman. Interesting. Okay, so yeah, that
sounds like the best way to think. But it is
self forming snowball. Snowball is forming on the surface of harder,
more compact snow slash ice. Right, So if you are
ever out wandering about in the snow and you see
one of these icy Swiss rolls, do not panic it
is it is not a sign of any looming danger.
(15:33):
You've just seen the laws of physics in very rare form.
But I think we should get to the all the
colors of the snow rain. But I want to ask
the question, can you paint with all the colors of
the snowstorm? Because I mean, most of us have only
seen white snow. I mean, I think it's fairly rare
(15:55):
to see snow of a different color. But it does
happen sometimes, right, And of course, once it falls, it
can become muddied quite literally by by many other things.
You know, you get to get brownish and blackish snow
because of the mud puddles. You get yellow snow because
of the urine you can get you can get red
snow because of the you know, the sacrifices you're you're
making to the to the gods and goddesses of spring
(16:18):
to bring the crops back. Right, But generally speaking the
stuff falls white. Yeah, but not all the time. So Robert,
I know you are a fan of the red snows
of Hell. Oh yes, so I want to hear a
little bit about this or what's the deal what's going
on in hell when it snows? Well, of course, in
this we we're dipping back into the fantasy world, the
(16:41):
literary world, before we come back into natural world snow accumulation.
But yeah, if you look into the works of of Dante,
if you look into particularly Dante's Inferno, you find a
lot of meteorology. Because Dante was a guy who was
just interested in everything, and just about everything he was
interested in found its way into the divine comedy. Uh,
(17:05):
And so there's a there's a lot of meteor meteorology
in his work. I do remember a lot of it. Like,
aren't the people who are on the level of lust
are constantly blown around by winds that they can't they
can't stay solid and be constant. Yeah. There there are
a ton of different examples, and in fact, if anyone
wants to look into this more, there highly recommend the
Weather of Hell. A look at the meteorology of Dante's
(17:28):
Inferno by Randy Serveny, and he he looks at, for instance,
how Dante seems to use of what would eventually become
our modern idea of convection and circulation cells. Really, yeah,
he does a he does a really fun job of
of lining up these different natural world weather phenomenons and
the observations of weather in the world that Dante creates
(17:52):
for us. Well, let's hear what Dante's got for us.
Can you give me an example? Yeah? Tying into uh
in today's topic, he mentions in Canto fourteen describing the
plane of burning sands. This is of course the translation
over all the sand fell slowly wafting down dilated flakes
of fire as flakes of snow on alpine summit when
(18:15):
the wind is hushed, as in the Torrett Indian Climb.
The sun of Ammon saw upon his warrior band ascending
solid flames that to the ground came down alright, So
you know he's talking about some reddish snow. It's kind
of open new interpretation. You can say, it's just it's
just it's easy to say, oh, I think he's just
(18:36):
talking about fire falling out of the sky. But he
started applying all this meteorology to the to the situation.
You can say, yeah, there's some sort of red snow
falling in Hell, which sounds right. Well wait a second,
hold on, now, how do you have snow in Hell?
Because I thought Hell was supposed to be really hot.
That's actually a feature of Dante's Hell, right, that many
parts of Hell are quite cold. Oh yeah, I mean
(18:58):
especially the bottomost reaches of Hell. When you get down
to the frozen lake of Positis, where where Lucifer is imprisoned,
he's frozen up to his waist in ice. So yeah,
there's got a it's got a wonderful scene of a
couple of guys who are frozen up to their necks
and ice, and one of them is chewing on the
other one's head. Oh yeah, yeah. And then there are
individuals whose head is turned upward so that they weep
(19:20):
for their crimes, and the water pools in the in
their eye socket, and then the water freezes and the
expansion of the water in their eye sockets causes them
even more pain. See that's the kind of like like
we just a little science the nuggets that Dante threw
in there, like he knew, he knew how water expanded
when it froze, and so that ended up in a
feature of hell. Well, I have great admiration for that.
(19:43):
So on the subject though, of of red snow, we
see a lot of different accounts of this as far
back as perhaps as the third century b C. When
Aristotle reported on the occurrence of red or blood snow.
A few centuries later, the Roman historian Plenty the Elder
originated the idea that the occasional red color and snow
is essentially like that of rust and metals. So this
(20:06):
is just old snow and it turns red, it falls. Uh.
And I love those ancient uh, those ancient explanations for
things any any time you read those those old old scientists,
like when they weren't using magic to explain how things happened,
and they were trying to come up with natural explanations.
But they and they just weren't there yet. The explanations
(20:28):
they come up with are always great. Yeah, and uh,
you know, the historical accounts going from their English. These
these particular accounts are also mentioned in Serveni's article about
the about weather and hell Um. English historian the Reverend
Thomas Short reported some near general Italy red snow that
(20:50):
fell and quote gave a bloody liquor when squeezed. Gross. Yeah. Uh.
Seventeen fifty five, a six foot deep blood snowfall is
reported in the Alps. Eighteen ten, French newspapers reported that
a shower of red snow, together with a fall of
insects fell over Paris. H. Yeah, well, you know, ball
of insects. It was snowing snow that was red and
(21:12):
insects at the same time. Yeah, exactly. And we'll see,
as we'll we'll discuss those two could be combined some
of the same, uh, features of those two phenomena. Residents
of Alma, Colorado reported a pink snowstorm. And then two
thousand fifteen, as we'll get into you find a couple
of different colors of snow occurring in Russia. Orange snow
(21:35):
in Saratov on the Volga River and blue snow in
Chelly Banks. Yeah. Actually, I've got some stuff to say
about that blue snow in a bit, because that one
it's especially creepy, but then it turns out alarmingly mundane. Um.
But yeah, So the obvious point we're getting at here
is that snow is not always white. Sometimes it has
(21:57):
strange colors, and there are there are a few known
causes for this, right yeah, Yeah, And a lot of
it really stems down to condensation nuclei. So this is
the idea that you have a little a little particles
and those serve as the as the gathering point for
for liquid water and then eventual, eventually in formation of
(22:17):
snow crystals and snow flakes that then fall back to
the surface of the earth. Okay, so you've got like
a physical particle of matter up in the air that's
sort of the seed of the snow snow crystal exactly. Yeah,
the everything forms around that. So at the heart of
a snowflake, you you have a particle, and if that
(22:39):
particle happens to say the if it happens to be
a reddish sand particle, and then it's it can make
the snowflake up here pink or red or orange, depending
and sometimes these are carried from from hundreds of miles away.
Uh for instance, Uh, there there accounts of colored snow
falling in Europe where the origin appears to be North Africa. Okay,
(23:01):
So if there's like a big sandstorm in the Sahara
or something like that, sand particles lifted up could become
part of the snow. It gets caught up into the
rise and fall of of air particles, the big convection
cells that that serves as a major part of the
air movements in our weather systems. Now, whatever his scientific credentials,
(23:23):
I imagine Dante had something a little gorrier in mind. Right.
Oh yeah, So in if you're wondering what's serving as
the conversation nuclei in Hell? Well, um, I mean certainly
there there there are particles of just normal in organic
matter around. But Serveny argues that the conversation nuclei here
would be bits of blood and gore evaporated into the
(23:44):
air from the boiling blood river of Flagius. So there
you go. It seems fitting the boiling blood river. So
there's a certain updraft of blood from the boiling river. Yeah,
all these people are boiled alive. It the water of
the river itself is blood, so all of that ends
up evaporating upward and then it has to come back down,
(24:05):
perhaps in the form of rain or snow. Now this
is a side note, Robert, but I do want to
get your opinion on this. Why do you think there
has never been a great movie version of Dante's Inferno made? Oh,
I mean the mist regional reasons. I mean, the old
silent one is kind of fun to watch, but I
think in large part because it's just so much content
(24:27):
that has to be crunched there. It's it's so steeped
in in medieval culture, in church history, in Dante's own
personal angst that I mean, how do you how do
you adapt that and and make it make it work
on the screen. Yeah. Another part of it, though, I
remember a friend told me once and it really stuck
with me, is it would be impossible to get an
(24:48):
R rating. How could you? How could you do it
without getting an unrated film which nobody wants to release. Yeah. Yeah,
there's a lot of graphic content, and they're particularly in Inferno.
But then there's also some just and stuff, like a
demon playing a trumpet with its butt. That's great poppy satan,
poppy satan. Yeah, nobody knows what it means. It's great.
Oh man, that could be a fun episode. Sometimes untranslatable phrases.
(25:12):
Uh well, okay, whatever is going on in Hell. As
we've discussed, there is sometimes red, orange, yellow snow in
the real world. But dust particles are not the only
scientific explanation for multicolored snow that sometimes looks like it
might be bleeding or full of vomit, or full of
something else gross, full of full of vile from the underworld,
(25:34):
because sometimes snow itself is actually an ecosystem. Yeah, this
is really phenomenal, and it in a way it ties
in nicely with Hell because you have essentially organic material
serving as the nuclad right. So, as explored in the
Scientific American article Wonderful Things, colon, don't eat the pink snow.
(25:57):
You have to consider numerous different species of snow algae,
including one particular one of note here, and that's the
green alergae species uh Clamo Dominus novellis. It's a green
cryophilic cryots that means it likes ice or likes cold,
likes the cold, likes the ice. Cryophilic algae that thrives
in freezing water and at the center of a snowflake.
(26:19):
Its zygote form depends on a red carrotinoid pigment to
protect it from u V bombardment. Oh wow, Yeah, when
ben beta carotene incidentally performs a similar duty absorbing u
V inside the human eye. So this has been something
just completely crazy and unique to this species. Yeah, so
this is a sort of would you call this an
extreme aphile? It seems like it would probably meet the
(26:41):
classification because, I mean, living in snow that's not a
very friendly environment, and you so one of the things
pointed out here is that it has to protect itself
from UVY bombardment. Living on snow is kind of like,
I don't know, if you wanted to just like live
on black asphalt or something. Uh, it's you're you're just
(27:01):
bombarded by the sunlight and I guess on the snow
it's reflecting black back because the snow is white. Um,
and then of course it's going to be very cold.
I can imagine that. It's where do you get your
your nutrients from if you need like mineral nutrients and
you're just sitting in the snow. That seems like a
nutrient poor environment. Yeah, it seems like a very rough
place to to carve out your your your little corner
(27:25):
of life, right, But apparently clamo dominos don't care. These uh,
these algae are I don't know they're they're they're tough
little buddies, but they do bring us a wonderful uh
site from time to time when people come across these
things and they're not prepared for it. They haven't read
these articles, they don't know exactly what it is. When
(27:45):
they encounter, for example, a snow bank on a mountain
side that just looks like it's full of blood, yeah,
or what happened here? Um? Or a delicious watermelon icy
that apparently they're often referred to as watermelon snows. Yeah,
when she scoop them up and taste it, well, I'll
I'll let you feel the eating of the watermelon snow.
(28:07):
But in terms of encountering it, you do tend to
encounter it on a permanent snowfields and sunny dry areas,
so the snow then ends up blushing, is melting, erosion
and evaporation occur, and then someone finds it and they say, hey,
maybe I'll have a bite of that. What happens. Well, apparently,
according to a couple of experts, it has significant laxative properties.
(28:30):
So the watermelon snow will will send you a run
into the nearest outhouse, which which may be especially troubling
if you're up in a mountain pass somewhere and it's
all bundled up for the winter, probably nowhere to go.
So pink snow probably begets uh, brown snow or black
snow depending. That's gross. Yeah, but but enough about brown snow.
(28:52):
How about how about a little blue snow for us?
We mentioned it earlier, you mentioned that blue snow. So
in February in the city of Tellia, Beans for Russia,
people started to see something alarming. It was bright blue snow.
And this is not just the way ice sometimes looks
like a powder blue and in the right kind of
light or the right kind of packing density of the ice.
(29:13):
I don't know. You've probably seen glaciers sometimes it look blue. Now,
this was snow that was bright blue, and easter egg
blue and blue. Just remind everyone blue is not a
color you encounter with tremendous frequency in the natural world.
Is the sky, yes, And and there's some that are
that we don't even see it that much in the sky. Uh,
(29:35):
a separate tangent that. But but yeah, in terms of
just finding oh this is this has the pigment blue
in it, you don't find it much. So Yeah, the
city in Russia, you've got this easter egg blue snow.
Residents claim that when they walk through the areas of
the blue snow, they experienced sore throats and could taste
a sweetness in the air. That's alarming. Uh. And Chillia
(29:56):
Ben unfortunately is no stranger to weird stuff falling from
the sky. They've had there a number of troubling events there.
One of them was that it was the part of
Russia that was closest to meteor event, the super Bowl
eight event, where a meteor from space inner Earth's atmosphere
at this really high velocity at a very shallow angle
(30:17):
and then exploded in a gigantic air bursts that was
brighter than the sun, and it shattered windows all throughout
the surrounding area, caused lots of injuries. It was a
serious meteorological or not meteorological, a serious space object event. Yeah.
And then I made some tremendous footage too, since so
(30:37):
many drivers in Russia have the dashboard cameras to protect themselves.
We ended up seeing this tremendous footage of this, uh,
this object searing across the sky. Yeah, so that they'd
had they'd had the sky explode just a couple of
years before, and then they got the blue snow. So
was the blue snow more doom from space? Probably not,
(31:00):
because in this case there was actually a fairly mundane
but still kind of creepy explanation. There was a local
food product manufacturer called Vtex, and they admitted through a
spokesperson that they essentially they had a spill. They had
a chemical spill. They spilled a bunch of powdered easter
egg die and the powdered die got into the ventilation
(31:21):
system and then it was expelled into the outside air
and eventually settled into the snow, dyeing it blue. That's all.
But apparently when you live in Russia, having weird colored
snow happens pretty frequently, I mean early, maybe not pretty frequently,
more frequently than than it seems to in other places,
(31:44):
because there are also stories of a Siberian city in
Russia having black snow blacks snow. Well that that of course,
that instantly brings to mind some possible explanations in terms
of just thinking, well, what sends black particles up into
the air burning? Of course of course, yeah, so it's
(32:07):
not the it's not the correlate of black sunshine, which
was my first guest. You know, you see black snow,
I'm thinking maybe they're filming a Mastodon music video nearby,
and so like, the snow is coming off the peaks
of Mountain Gloom Max and Caughton across wind. But but
it wasn't that, it wasn't a special effect. It was
an accidental byproduct of industry or actually we would say
(32:31):
not industry but power production. In this case, though it
happened in the Siberian city of Omsk, which is apparently
an industrial center. That the first story I heard about
this was in the Moscow Times, reported in December, and
they said in the Siberian city of twice in one
week the city was covered in black snow, and apparently
(32:52):
the locals were given lots of assurances the black snow
does not present a health risk, don't worry about the
black snow, just go about business. The best lead at
the time to explain it was that they said that
local prosecutors had begun they began investigating a couple of
local businesses. One was a coal producer and the other
(33:12):
one was a thermal power station known as Thermal Power
Station Number five. And then they reported again this was
also in the Moscow Times in February, that the black
snow was back. It was back in in skin. This
time they reported that it was traceable to air pollution
from the city's thermal and electrical power plants. So apparently,
when it's very cold, the coldest times of the year,
(33:36):
they really crank up the engines at the thermal power
plants and this causes extra unfiltered atmospheric pollutants to get
out into the air condense and then fall down in
the snow and cover the city in this this scary
black snow that reminds me of some of the some
of the ideas I've read about a theoretical nuclear winter
(33:59):
in which you've had multiple nuclear devices detonate over large
population centers, and of course it ends up uh possibly
serving as a sarcophagus for the earth um and preventing
the sunlight from from warming the world as it should.
But I've also read that you would have. You might
have so much material burnt up in those cities, those
(34:20):
centers of population, both people and just buildings and life
itself there, that you would have black or gray snows falling,
just the ash from those incinerations. Thanks for cheering us.
Uh yeah. So anyway, the thermal power station involved in
the story said they said they'd get a new filter. Okay,
(34:42):
all right, just turns out, yeah, we need a new filter.
We'll get that replaced. Okay. So we've talked about the
many colors of snow that sometimes crop up on Earth,
but it's all still Earth snow. We've mentioned hell snow
a little bit, but but I want to hear about
some real alien snow, Like, does it snow on Mars?
Does it snow on other planets? What what happens beyond
(35:04):
the bounds of our little blue marble. Well, here's what
we know, um, and I'm just gonna go through some
some planets here, some also some some moons in our
solar system and discuss just what might be falling that
at least resembles snow. Okay, let's start with Mars. We
already know what's going on in Earth, but on Mars,
in the polar regions, you'll find carbon dioxide crystal snow. Uh,
(35:28):
but not in the form of traditional snowflakes, but more
in the form of cubo octahedrons. And so these are
these are they have eight triangular faces and six square faces. Okay, wait, wait,
hold on, So it carbon dioxide snow. That would mean
it's snowing dry ice, right if dry ice is frozen
carbon dioxide, essentially, Yeah, that's that's my reta. That's messed up.
(35:53):
But if you go on on over to Jupiter, if
you visit the Jovian moon Io, you'll find sulfur dioxide snow. Okay,
So molten sulfur blasts out of the Moon's many active volcanoes,
it freezes in space and it falls back down as
as fluffy yellow snow. That's sick. I Owe is a
really cool moon, by the way, Everybody, when whenever people
(36:16):
are talking about the moons of Jupiter, Europa gets all
the attention because it's got those subterranean oceans. You think
you might find life there or something like that. But
but i Owe is worth a look. It is a
volatile volcanic hellscape of a planet that's really beautiful and
very interesting. Indeed. Now, if you head on out the Saturn,
(36:36):
you can visit in Sladus, and here you'll find water
and ammonious snow, thanks to water and ammonia geysers in
the south polar region that blast their content hundreds of
miles into space, so far that most of it doesn't
even come back down again. It leaves in Sladus and
eventually for forms part of Saturn's e ring. But what
(36:58):
whatever doesn't venture out to the ear ring falls back
down as powdery snow. And this is crazy. The snow
doesn't accumulate with any real degree of speed, but it's
been falling so long in certain regions of Enceladus for
millions of years, So in places we suspect that you
have hundred meter deep um snow drifts of this water
(37:22):
and ammonious snow. So what would happen if you landed
on one of those snow drifts? Would you just sink
into it? Ah? Don't? Yeah? Maybe because it's supposedly pretty
powdery stuff. Yeah I wouldn't. I don't. I don't. I
don't think the sense that it would be particularly packed.
All right, if we head on out a little further
into the Solar system, will visit Neptune, specifically, will visit
(37:44):
the Neptunian Neptunian moon Triton. All right, and here nitrogen
and methane snow falls in the southern polar region. Uh.
And it's pink snow. So potentially this this could be
what's going on in the cat and Hat comes back. Now,
will it give you the runs? Um? I don't think
it would have. Uh. I don't think it would be
(38:06):
good for you. I would not eat it if you
visit Triton in the foreseef the future. Uh. It's also
worth noting that this snow is also caused by geysers,
so similar to what we've talked about on on Enceladus.
And then finally, if you venture out the Pluto, you
might get some snow there as well. Hubble space telescope
(38:28):
findings originally suggested that that the Pluto experiences snows of nitrogen,
methane and possibly carbon monoxide, and New Horizons are recent
evidence seems to support the idea. But but we're talking
a pretty pretty distant location in our solar system here. Yeah.
I remember reading about that when the New Horizons data
(38:50):
was first coming back, that they were they were talking
about what types of particles you would have falling down
on the surface of Pluto, which again was one of
the things that surprised me about Pluto, but because I
guess for some reason, I thought of it as just
absolutely dead. Yeah, just like a place kind of like
the Moon where just not much is going on. Yeah.
I feel like our idea of of Pluto has been
(39:11):
so reduced in recent years, given our increased knowledge about
what's there and what might be there, that we just
we don't think of it having any kind of systems
in place. You just think of it is this dead rock. Yeah,
but but not so. The new findings about Pluto from
New Horizons are very interesting, all right, Joe. We just
traveled pretty far away from from Earth, all the way
(39:33):
out to to the to the far reaches of our
solar system. So it makes sense that at this point
in the podcast, we've moved, we've moved further and further
away from our original starting point. Let's get into some
conspiracy theories about snow, which, oh, this was also new
to me. I really didn't think about the fact that
there would be conspiracy theories about the content of our snow.
(39:56):
Of course, there are because they're they're always conspiracy theories
about whether for some reason, whether is a big thing
and conspiracy thing. Really, yeah, anytime there's a strange weather event,
and so of course big snowstorms are no different. There
have been conspiracy theories about snow storms, and one of
them is the Atlanta Snowmageddon that happened in January. We're
(40:18):
bringing it all back home, so if you don't know,
Robert and Kristen and I we record out of Atlanta, Georgia,
and in January, Atlanta, Georgia was essentially smashed into pieces
by two inches of snow. Yeah, just completely shut down.
Um and a lot of it had to do with
(40:39):
this preparation for it and how everyone, Includingland City responded
initially in terms of shutting things down, the fact that
there are more cars in Atlanta than there are atoms.
I mean, it was a big problem. The freeways were
jammed with cars that were stuck in the snow. People
were freaking out of it, trying to trying to find
ways to get home. A lot of people couldn't. They
(41:01):
were stuck in a McDonald's overnight or something like that.
I mean, it was a it was a big problem.
I don't know what happened to you, Robert did Did
you get home? All right? Yeah? We we didn't have
any problem. Uh we were just at home with our
son during that time, and uh he was just amazed
by the snow and didn't really like going out in it.
(41:23):
But uh, yeah, I was very lucky too. It was
very fortunate I got home and didn't really encounter any
major problems. But we all, I think we all knew
people who were either stuck at work or stuck you know,
even worse somewhere between work and home, or caught at
the airport. They were just like everybody had it, had
those stories at least in their initial orbit. Yeah. But
(41:44):
for a lot of people, this was not just a
major uh does that a major you know weather event
and problem in the city. It was a big wake
up sheep all moment. You know. They were like, get
your kids to stop making snow angels because that snow
is fake and it's c I a satanism. Huh Okay, well,
(42:06):
well let's hear this. Let's hear that the argument for
why Atlanta was subjected to fake snow and how how
would you even know? How do you prove that this
is fake snow as opposed to real snow. Well, the
general principle behind this conspiracy theory might be older, but
a wave of videos emerged in the winner of and
the standard setup goes like this. A guy gets his camera,
(42:28):
he goes outside, and he scoops up some snow from
his yard, and he brings it inside and he rolls
it in his palm to pack it into a little
snowball or a little snow tube, and then he holds
a cigarette lighter up to it, and much to our surprise,
the snow does not melt into water and drip away,
or at least not as fast as we would expect.
(42:51):
Instead of liquefying and dripping onto the floor. The part
of the snow exposed to the lighter looks like it
kind of collapses in on itself, and then it turns
gray or black. And then the narrator observes that the
snow must be fake plastic, toxic chemicals, harp juice, geoengineering nanoparticles.
(43:12):
You know about HARP, M not sure I do. It's
a radio transmission research project up in Alaska that a
lot of conspiracy theorists think is I don't know, being
used to create earthquakes or create bad weather events at
more these weather conspiracs. Okay, so it's a conspiracy theory
touchdown area, Yeah yeah, yeah, so they think it's it's
(43:33):
has something to do with that, or it's chem trails,
or it's geoengineering nanoparticles or nano robots or some other
evil substance. Uh, and then they exhort yonder sheeple to awaken. Okay,
what what's the motive? Not quite sure? I mean, was
it just like there were some Yankee scientists who are
trying to make it Landol look foolish by shutting down
(43:54):
the city with two inches of fake snow. That was
one of the results. That's yeah, I don't know, but anyway,
several be some sort of corporate espionage thing because you
end up shutting down the city economically, So maybe there
was some hidden nefarious purpose there. I suppose we'll never know.
But anyway, so there are several scientists and skeptics who
(44:15):
took a crack at this to see what was going on.
The first observation, it obviously wasn't a conspiracy to cripple
Atlanta or the Southeast in particular with this stuff, because
people from other regions burned their snowballs with cigarette lighters
and got the same result. So if this is a conspiracy,
it's a global conspiracy. This is probably more a situation
(44:36):
of most people don't try to burn snowballs, and and
surprisingly the result of trying to burn snow snowballs is
different than you might expect. Right, that's exactly what's going on.
So what is happening with the snow? Why does it
do this? Uh? First of all, why doesn't it drip?
You would you would expect, I mean I certainly intuitively
would have expected if you hold a lighter up to
(44:57):
a snowball, it's gonna drip water all over the floor.
And that does That doesn't seem to happen. Here's the explanation.
Freshly fallen snow is like nine to nine air, Okay,
So and this is the reason why snow. You know,
you have some animals that will dig a snow cave
(45:19):
for insulation from the cold, and you think like, wait,
how can that protect them from the cold if they're
in the snow? Yeah, totally true. So the snow has
a lot of gaps in it, and with all these
little pockets of air in it, the air can't really
move around, and it ends up creating a good insulation
layer between the what's going on inside and the heat
(45:41):
from the outside. Anyway, it's not very dense, so snow,
even packed snow packed into a snowball, is less dense
than ice or liquid water. It's kind of like wool
or any other loose solid material. It's full of wonderful
little pockets and tunnels and spaces for liqu water to
be absorbed. And so when you hold a lighter up
(46:05):
to a snowball and melt the water, the water is melting,
the ice is melting and turning into liquid water, but
it's being absorbed up into all those pockets in the snowball,
those little holes and places for liquid water to go. Okay,
So it's not like just how it would be like
holding the lighter up to a chunk of ice, for instance, right,
And it's true, if you hold a lighter up to
(46:26):
a chunk of ice, it'll drip. The snowball doesn't drip
very much. What's the explanation though, for the blackening? That's
the really weird thing and holding a lighter, holding a
cigarette lighter up to a snowball and then the snowball
appears to get scorched, it turns gray or black. I mean,
water isn't supposed to get scorched. That doesn't happen, and
it's true the water is in fact not getting scorched.
(46:48):
What's going on here is that the lighters that people
are using in these videos are standard butane lighters. The
fuel is butane, which is a hydrocarbon fuel. It's C
four H tin, and it does doesn't always burned with
perfect efficiency. C four H tin reacts in a combustion
reaction with oxygen that creates C O two so carbon
dioxide and then water H two oh. But it also
(47:11):
sometimes produces a pollutant byproduct to the fact that it
doesn't burn perfectly clean. And these are extra carbon particles.
The carbon particles are black, and we call them soot. Okay,
so we kind of get down to the black snow
situation we had earlier with the power plant pumping up
a bunch of black foot into the atmosphere. Exactly. Yeah,
(47:31):
So you're what's going on when you're snowball turns black
when you cook it with the lighter. Is not that
the snow is turning black. You are polluting the snowball
with soot from the lighter you're using. The soot collects
on the clean white snowball and stains at a darker color.
So here's the real conspiracy theory deathblow. People said, well,
(47:55):
what if we heat the snowball in a different way
than with a lighter, like if we put it in
a bowl in the microwave or in a pan on
the stove, And what do you know? It melted into
regular water just fine. Uh. Though in the pan, an
interesting thing that you can see happen is that the
part of the snowball that's touching the pan on the bottom,
it begins to melt first, and then the rest of
(48:17):
the snowball absorbs the liquid water. You can see the
water level of flowing up as if by capillary action
into the snowball above it. And uh and there you
pretty much have what's going on. And this gives us
a new activity to enjoy on on snow days this year. Yeah,
frying snowballs is that is now? That's got to be
(48:41):
the next big state fair food. Right. They've got they've
got they've got deep fried Snickers bars, deep fried kool aid,
And the next thing is going to be deep fried
snow maybe. Well, I mean you did fried ice cream, right,
I've never had that? What what do you do with that?
How does it not melt? I think it's well, it's
(49:02):
been a long time since I've had it. I seem
to recall that it is, uh like really cold ice cream,
and it's just fried so quickly that it's the ice
cream is melting as you open it up. But it's
been it's been a long time since I had it. Likewise,
it's been a long time since I've had us. You know,
what do you what do you call it when you
just had sugar to the snow and you eat it?
(49:23):
Snow cone? Well, I guess you could call it that.
We had we called it something different though as a kid, Oh,
snow cone is a good analogy for what's going on here. Actually,
if you pour the syrup into a snow cone, yeah,
it's absorbed into the snow. The yeah. But anyway. One
of one of the best sources I found on this
was the was the astronomer and skeptic blogger Phil plates
(49:44):
blog posts over its slate Bad Astronomy, Yeah, yeah, bad astronomer.
He he had a really good breakdown of exactly what's
going on, and I think he has the most thorough
explanation of of exactly why this is not snow you
should be worried about. Okay, alright, So so, in other words,
when it comes to generating conspiracy theories about the next
(50:04):
big snowfall, look elsewhere. We've already we've already thoroughly explained
the fake snow, the blackening snow, the snow that won't melt.
On the other hand, as our as our several lessons
from Siberia have taught us, if you do see snow
that seems to be laden with chemicals, it's entirely possible
(50:24):
that this is some kind of weird industrial byproduct or
otherwise not good snow and might be worth bringing to
somebody's attention. So it's possible that that not all snow
is good snow. Yeah, and yeah, and if it's a
strange color, you maybe think twice before you attempt to
deep fry it for the fair. So they have it
some weird snow, some space snow, some multicolored snow, some
(50:48):
evil snow. Yeah, So there's a little more material for
you to think about when when the white stuff starts falling.
This winter on you and you begin to wonder if
you're going to school or work the next morning. Okay, so, honestly,
do you think we're going to get any snow here
in Atlanta this year? Ba's on what we've seen so far,
I would say no. I would say this year is off.
(51:08):
But you know, so the way things have been going
recently with the crazy weathered patterns, maybe we'll get in July. Yeah,
who knows? Yeah, all right, that's it. In the meantime,
if you want to check out more episodes again, head
on over the stuff Blow your Mind dot com. That's
where you find all the podcast episodes. You find videos,
you'll find blog posts, will find links to social media
account such as uh our, Twitter and Facebook. We'll blow
(51:29):
the mind on both of those were Stuff to Blow
your Mind on Tumbler, And if you want to get
in touch with us with your favorite science facts about
snow or your weirdest personal snow story, you can email
us and blow the mind at how stuff works dot com.
(51:51):
For more on this and pathans of other topics. Is
it how stuff works dot com. The four start fo
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stop
Work dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Brown, and I'm showing the format.
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(01:09):
All right, Joe, let's get going on the topic here today.
We're talking about snow because we are in the midst
of winter of some sort where we are highly unlikely
to see snow, because, let's face it, we live in
Atlanta and it's not unusual to have a d degree
days in December. Yes, most of my snow these days
is coming in the form of storytelling and storybook reading
(01:31):
with my son, particularly the Doctor Seuss book The Cat
in the Hat Comes Back. Are you familiar with this
text at all? I don't think so. No. Now was
this written this one in Alexander Sultan Itsen? No? No,
this was Dr sus is Doctor Sears? Okay, the Cat
in the Hat comes back? Does he come back for revenge? Um? Depended,
(01:51):
you know, it depends on your read of Cat in
the Hat and what cat and what this hat cat
wants out of its visits. This is, of course, the
sequel to The Cat in the Hat. You might remember
that one is the adventure in which the cat shows
up on a rainy day and starts causing a mess,
brings in Thing one and Thing two, and they run
him up and then Eventually they have to catch thing
(02:12):
and the thing one and thing too and uh, Sally
and her brother get the cat out, get the place
cleaned up, just in the nick of time. But they've
effectively staved off boredom, so it's not a total loss. Yeah, indeed.
But in the sequel, this is what's happening. It's a
snow day. There's snow everywhere, and Sally and her brother
are outside cleaning up the snow and her mother is
(02:33):
that their mothers who knows where, but they're at home
doing chores. Cat and Hat shows up, goes in the house,
and the brother instantly thinks, well, this is no good.
I'm going in. I'm gonna check this out and make
sure the cat's not racking the place like he did
last time. Because the cat and Hat is a is
an agent of chaos, and I don't think he's I
don't think he's good or bad, but he brings chaos
(02:54):
to wherever he goes. He's kind of a low key figure, yeah, exactly.
He's a trickster god. And in this particular incident, the
first name the cat does is start eating pink cake
in the bathtub, which is which looks very fun and inviting,
you know the book, uh, and the boy he says,
all right, the brothers says, there, you gotta get out
of there. This is making a mess, and indeed it
(03:15):
makes a pink ring in the tub when he drains it.
So the cat in the hats thing is has always
been that he's gonna help clean up because he's responsible.
But his cleanup techniques tend to be a bit chaotic
as well, and in this case it is kind of
an Amelia Badelia. Right. Yeah, even the well meaning attempts
to fix things sort of cause more chaos, right, and
(03:36):
his methods are are strange, And in this case it's
not it's not a situation where you just all right, well,
let's wash off the tub like a normal person would.
The cat transfers the pink stain from one item to
another in the house, so it goes everywhere until it
eventually winds up on the father's bed and he has
to call in all these additional hat cats, these increasingly
smaller cat in the hats from under his hat. With
(04:00):
each one has a different letter of the alphabet is
its name, So eventually you just have all there's a
whole bunch of different sized hat cats working to destroy
the stain, which eventually ends up outside the house, staining
all of the snow. Uh. And they keep trying harder
and harder, they keep pulverizing the snow, but it remains pink.
(04:20):
It's only when the very smallest hat cat of all
hat cat z, a cat that is so small that
we we are told we cannot actually see it, that
cat takes off his hat and inside that is something
called voom, and zoom cleans up all the snow, makes
it white again. But what is voom? I don't know.
That's the That's that's a question that I want our
(04:42):
listeners to keep in mind. Two questions. A what is
this pink snow exactly that Sally and her brother and
the hat cats are dealing with. And indeed, what is voom? What?
What is this uh this strange substance or or mo
molecule or or energy within the the hat cats these
(05:04):
hat what is it? And how does it clean up
that snow? It's MINTI Glorean's it might be well. Obviously,
the cat and the hat comes back is just a
delightful children's fantasy, But there are a lot of strange
facts and strange circumstances in which people have encountered quite
bizarre snow events in the real world. I don't know
(05:26):
about Boom, but pink snow is not just a dream.
It's a fact about reality. It happens sometimes for various
causes and in various locations, and not just pink. We've
seen black snow, green snow, blue snow, we've seen We've
seen weird snow sculptures that seem not to have been
(05:46):
made by humans or animals. We've seen snow that some
people think isn't actually made of water and it's maybe
some kind of like nano robot army invading the world.
So so I thought it would be worth doing an
episode just to talk about out all of the weird
ways that that snow can freak people out. Indeed, indeed,
so let's you know, one one way that that a
(06:09):
natural phenomena intends to freak us out is when it's
it's size is different, you know, I mean, that's the
whole thing. Nobody cares about seeing a rat, but if
you see a giant rat, and well that's worth talking about.
How about giant snowflakes? Yeah, you know, snowflakes are not
like scorpions, whereas with a scorpion, a giant scorpion, that's
(06:30):
really interesting. But even a normal size, very small scorpion
is worth your attention. How big does a snowflake have
to get before you actually stop and take notice? Well,
that's a good question. So obviously a normal size I
don't know what what what a normal size would be?
Maybe a couple of millimeters or so for a snowflake
that that's not worth your attention. If it were a
(06:50):
few inches across, that would be something you'd notice, right, Um,
And it turns out that that does happen sometimes. Now,
the biggest on record is one where the record itself
is highly disputable. The traditional record holder for for the
biggest snowflake was supposedly observed by a rancher named Matt
(07:11):
Coleman of Fort Keo, Montana in eighteen seven. That is
big sky country, right, oh is it? I think so?
In the Montana big sky count I don't know. I mean,
if there's bigger sky or the bigger snowflakes, I would
guess so that that seems to be the relationship going
on here. Well, let's hear what Matt had to say
about what happened on a ranch. According to Matt, there
were snowflakes that were falling that were bigger than a
(07:33):
milk pan. Yeah, so they were fifteen inches wide and
eight inches thick. So you've got these like frisbee sized
snow Yeah, that's like a that's like a pizza. And
also one of the things you'd have to imagine is
that a snowflake of that size would have enough density
with the ice crystal within it that it would be
(07:54):
falling pretty fast and pretty hard. This is certainly something
that's true. Larger snowflake tend to fall faster. Uh, those
snowflakes that are several inches across will fall faster than
you know, light fluffy, tiny little thing. So I don't
know what it would be like to stand under a
snowflake that's fifteen inches wide. I mean, would that be
like a giant Ninja star coming from this guy to
(08:16):
kill you? I mean it almost sounds like like a
spiritual experience. It's like like seeing an alien life form
or an angelic visitation is occurring in your life, right, Yeah, yeah,
death frisbees from heaven. But anyway, fifteen inches wide, I
don't somehow, I don't believe Matt the Rancher. I think
Matt the Rancher may have been exaggerating. That's just my
(08:38):
gut feeling. It could be wrong. Apparently this guy's word
was good enough for the Guinness Book of World Records.
But I mean, it's not like they sent a team
of investigators out there to verify it and they measured
the snowflake and everything. I think we're pretty much just
going on what this guy said he saw. Okay, and
I can easily imagine a rancher out in the middle
of nowhere in Montana and have you think kind of
(09:00):
looks the same. After a few days, the mind begins
the sort of non itself a little bit, and then
in the midst of a snowstorm, you are visited by this, uh,
this geometric entity, right Thor's and Ninja stars. Yeah, you
call up Guinnis and they write it down because they
need to push some coffees. Okay, So, and I don't
(09:22):
know about fifteen inches, but it's definitely true that that
snowflakes several inches across happened sometimes around the world, and
that's freaky enough on its own. YEA, if I saw
a snowflake three or four inches across, I would think
the Odin's sleep was dawning, Yeah, or that I was
shrinking one of the two. That's a good way of
looking at it too, But of course that's not the
only way that snow can do something physically very strange
(09:46):
with without having anybody mess with it. Yeah, and this
was something I had I had not heard of before.
This was a new one when you brought this up
to this episode. Yeah. So I want to put you
in a scenario. Imagine you are out hiking in the
rocky mountains on New Year's Day. You're a little bit hungover,
You've got your rifle across your back, You've got your
(10:07):
snow shoes on your feet, and you've got your VHS
camcorder with the cracked lens and it's fully charged up
on battery power. Because today is the day you are
finally going to capture video evidence of Bigfoot. Well, you know,
that is my New Year's resolution for the coming year,
just finally, you know, quit talking about it and just
get some video footage of of the of the SAT squad.
(10:29):
Put up or shut up, It's the ultimate personal betterment.
But anyway, you're you're snow shoeing alone through a desolate
mountain pass and suddenly you come out of the pines
into this pristine, snow covered clearing and you look out
beyond the path and you see something very strange. You
see dozens of white cylinders lying on the ground on
(10:50):
their side, each between about like one and two feet tall,
And the best way to describe it is that it
looks like someone has taken a flyer layer of snow
and rolled it up like you might roll up a
flat sheet of pastry into a cinnamon roll. And sometimes
it's this solid, spiraling cylinder like the cinnamon roll, and
(11:12):
sometimes it's more like a doughnut. There's a hole in
the middle, making it look like a white car tire
or one description I've read, a gigantic white cheerio just
sitting there in the snow. And you look around and
there are no footprints anywhere, no indication that anyone has
created these giant icy spirals, unless, of course sasquatch has
(11:36):
wings now, and you know that's how he did it.
But what's going on here? Well, I read an article
where a guy named Mike Stanford had an experience like
this in two thousand seven. He wasn't hunting sasquatch, No
no rifle or VHS cam quarter. But in a two
thousand seven article for the Seattle Times, the author Susan
(11:56):
Gilmour speaks to Stanford, who's this avalanche control role expert
for the Washington State Department of Transportation. That sounds like
a pretty cool job, by the way. Yeah, plus sounds
like he's an ideal person to start thinking about this phenomenon,
right because the movement of snow, the physics of snow
that's right up is out. So while uh, Stanford was
out doing avalanche control work in the North Cascades in
(12:20):
March two thousand and seven, he came across these giant
doughnuts made of snow in a place called Washington Pass,
and the biggest ones were like two ft tall, with
a hole in the middle that he claimed was big
enough for him to fit his head through. I don't
know if that means he actually stuck his head all
the way through it, he said, he put his face
up to it. It does give me an idea to
(12:42):
write a horror story with this great novel execution device,
which would be the ice Gia team. Oh man, that yeah,
don't stick your head into one of these. That was
I mean, even if it's just two ft tall, it's
just uh yeah. I mean, we don't typically want to
be an alarmist on this podcast, but but just played
on the safe side, don't stick your head in, you know,
(13:03):
if you encounter some alien looking ice sore snow sculpture
out in the middle of nowhere, because yeah, this I think,
you know. Back to your question, like, how would I
respond to this, I think I would. I would be
a little freaked out by it, especially since, as I stated,
I was not familiar with this phenomena until you mentioned
it to me. Yeah, well I would pretty obviously. I
(13:24):
mean I've read about it now. But before I had
read about it, I would think someone had made these. Yeah,
I would think ice cannibals that are waiting on me to,
you know, to look at their holy structures or perhaps
I scull them scat and therefore I need to be
aware that there's a giant creature of ice in my vicinity, right.
But no, they are not made by humans or by animals.
(13:45):
That they're very rare, but they've been sighted and photographed
all over the place everywhere, from the mountains to the
prairies on very special occasions, because they're they're just one
of those weird byproducts of the naked laws of physics
when all the variables are just right, and they really
do have to be just right. These things don't happen
very often. But here here's what you do. Oh, by
(14:08):
the way, the name of them, people call them snow rollers,
that's the most common. Also snow donuts, but the snow rollers.
So to get one, you start on the bottom with
a hard crusty surface of ice or solid snow. Uh
And it's it's supposed to be hard and crusty so
that the new falling snow doesn't stick to it very well.
(14:28):
So you've got this hard, crusty surface and then looser,
relatively wet snow piling up on top of the hard layer.
And then you add a force like gravity or just
the right kind of wind, and whichever one it is.
If it's gravity pulling it down along a slope or
wind blowing it across the side, there begins to be
(14:50):
a lateral movement across the ground and it scoops up
the layers of the looser, denser snow, which sticks to
itself but doesn't stick to the harder layer benea it
starts to roll up along the surface of the hard layer,
keeps picking up more loose snow as it goes, and
it essentially is a self forming snowball, like like you'd
(15:10):
used to make a snowman. Interesting. Okay, so yeah, that
sounds like the best way to think. But it is
self forming snowball. Snowball is forming on the surface of harder,
more compact snow slash ice. Right, So if you are
ever out wandering about in the snow and you see
one of these icy Swiss rolls, do not panic it
is it is not a sign of any looming danger.
(15:33):
You've just seen the laws of physics in very rare form.
But I think we should get to the all the
colors of the snow rain. But I want to ask
the question, can you paint with all the colors of
the snowstorm? Because I mean, most of us have only
seen white snow. I mean, I think it's fairly rare
(15:55):
to see snow of a different color. But it does
happen sometimes, right, And of course, once it falls, it
can become muddied quite literally by by many other things.
You know, you get to get brownish and blackish snow
because of the mud puddles. You get yellow snow because
of the urine you can get you can get red
snow because of the you know, the sacrifices you're you're
making to the to the gods and goddesses of spring
(16:18):
to bring the crops back. Right, But generally speaking the
stuff falls white. Yeah, but not all the time. So Robert,
I know you are a fan of the red snows
of Hell. Oh yes, so I want to hear a
little bit about this or what's the deal what's going
on in hell when it snows? Well, of course, in
this we we're dipping back into the fantasy world, the
(16:41):
literary world, before we come back into natural world snow accumulation.
But yeah, if you look into the works of of Dante,
if you look into particularly Dante's Inferno, you find a
lot of meteorology. Because Dante was a guy who was
just interested in everything, and just about everything he was
interested in found its way into the divine comedy. Uh,
(17:05):
And so there's a there's a lot of meteor meteorology
in his work. I do remember a lot of it. Like,
aren't the people who are on the level of lust
are constantly blown around by winds that they can't they
can't stay solid and be constant. Yeah. There there are
a ton of different examples, and in fact, if anyone
wants to look into this more, there highly recommend the
Weather of Hell. A look at the meteorology of Dante's
(17:28):
Inferno by Randy Serveny, and he he looks at, for instance,
how Dante seems to use of what would eventually become
our modern idea of convection and circulation cells. Really, yeah,
he does a he does a really fun job of
of lining up these different natural world weather phenomenons and
the observations of weather in the world that Dante creates
(17:52):
for us. Well, let's hear what Dante's got for us.
Can you give me an example? Yeah? Tying into uh
in today's topic, he mentions in Canto fourteen describing the
plane of burning sands. This is of course the translation
over all the sand fell slowly wafting down dilated flakes
of fire as flakes of snow on alpine summit when
(18:15):
the wind is hushed, as in the Torrett Indian Climb.
The sun of Ammon saw upon his warrior band ascending
solid flames that to the ground came down alright, So
you know he's talking about some reddish snow. It's kind
of open new interpretation. You can say, it's just it's
just it's easy to say, oh, I think he's just
(18:36):
talking about fire falling out of the sky. But he
started applying all this meteorology to the to the situation.
You can say, yeah, there's some sort of red snow
falling in Hell, which sounds right. Well wait a second,
hold on, now, how do you have snow in Hell?
Because I thought Hell was supposed to be really hot.
That's actually a feature of Dante's Hell, right, that many
parts of Hell are quite cold. Oh yeah, I mean
(18:58):
especially the bottomost reaches of Hell. When you get down
to the frozen lake of Positis, where where Lucifer is imprisoned,
he's frozen up to his waist in ice. So yeah,
there's got a it's got a wonderful scene of a
couple of guys who are frozen up to their necks
and ice, and one of them is chewing on the
other one's head. Oh yeah, yeah. And then there are
individuals whose head is turned upward so that they weep
(19:20):
for their crimes, and the water pools in the in
their eye socket, and then the water freezes and the
expansion of the water in their eye sockets causes them
even more pain. See that's the kind of like like
we just a little science the nuggets that Dante threw
in there, like he knew, he knew how water expanded
when it froze, and so that ended up in a
feature of hell. Well, I have great admiration for that.
(19:43):
So on the subject though, of of red snow, we
see a lot of different accounts of this as far
back as perhaps as the third century b C. When
Aristotle reported on the occurrence of red or blood snow.
A few centuries later, the Roman historian Plenty the Elder
originated the idea that the occasional red color and snow
is essentially like that of rust and metals. So this
(20:06):
is just old snow and it turns red, it falls. Uh.
And I love those ancient uh, those ancient explanations for
things any any time you read those those old old scientists,
like when they weren't using magic to explain how things happened,
and they were trying to come up with natural explanations.
But they and they just weren't there yet. The explanations
(20:28):
they come up with are always great. Yeah, and uh,
you know, the historical accounts going from their English. These
these particular accounts are also mentioned in Serveni's article about
the about weather and hell Um. English historian the Reverend
Thomas Short reported some near general Italy red snow that
(20:50):
fell and quote gave a bloody liquor when squeezed. Gross. Yeah. Uh.
Seventeen fifty five, a six foot deep blood snowfall is
reported in the Alps. Eighteen ten, French newspapers reported that
a shower of red snow, together with a fall of
insects fell over Paris. H. Yeah, well, you know, ball
of insects. It was snowing snow that was red and
(21:12):
insects at the same time. Yeah, exactly. And we'll see,
as we'll we'll discuss those two could be combined some
of the same, uh, features of those two phenomena. Residents
of Alma, Colorado reported a pink snowstorm. And then two
thousand fifteen, as we'll get into you find a couple
of different colors of snow occurring in Russia. Orange snow
(21:35):
in Saratov on the Volga River and blue snow in
Chelly Banks. Yeah. Actually, I've got some stuff to say
about that blue snow in a bit, because that one
it's especially creepy, but then it turns out alarmingly mundane. Um.
But yeah, So the obvious point we're getting at here
is that snow is not always white. Sometimes it has
(21:57):
strange colors, and there are there are a few known
causes for this, right yeah, Yeah, And a lot of
it really stems down to condensation nuclei. So this is
the idea that you have a little a little particles
and those serve as the as the gathering point for
for liquid water and then eventual, eventually in formation of
(22:17):
snow crystals and snow flakes that then fall back to
the surface of the earth. Okay, so you've got like
a physical particle of matter up in the air that's
sort of the seed of the snow snow crystal exactly. Yeah,
the everything forms around that. So at the heart of
a snowflake, you you have a particle, and if that
(22:39):
particle happens to say the if it happens to be
a reddish sand particle, and then it's it can make
the snowflake up here pink or red or orange, depending
and sometimes these are carried from from hundreds of miles away.
Uh for instance, Uh, there there accounts of colored snow
falling in Europe where the origin appears to be North Africa. Okay,
(23:01):
So if there's like a big sandstorm in the Sahara
or something like that, sand particles lifted up could become
part of the snow. It gets caught up into the
rise and fall of of air particles, the big convection
cells that that serves as a major part of the
air movements in our weather systems. Now, whatever his scientific credentials,
(23:23):
I imagine Dante had something a little gorrier in mind. Right.
Oh yeah, So in if you're wondering what's serving as
the conversation nuclei in Hell? Well, um, I mean certainly
there there there are particles of just normal in organic
matter around. But Serveny argues that the conversation nuclei here
would be bits of blood and gore evaporated into the
(23:44):
air from the boiling blood river of Flagius. So there
you go. It seems fitting the boiling blood river. So
there's a certain updraft of blood from the boiling river. Yeah,
all these people are boiled alive. It the water of
the river itself is blood, so all of that ends
up evaporating upward and then it has to come back down,
(24:05):
perhaps in the form of rain or snow. Now this
is a side note, Robert, but I do want to
get your opinion on this. Why do you think there
has never been a great movie version of Dante's Inferno made? Oh,
I mean the mist regional reasons. I mean, the old
silent one is kind of fun to watch, but I
think in large part because it's just so much content
(24:27):
that has to be crunched there. It's it's so steeped
in in medieval culture, in church history, in Dante's own
personal angst that I mean, how do you how do
you adapt that and and make it make it work
on the screen. Yeah. Another part of it, though, I
remember a friend told me once and it really stuck
with me, is it would be impossible to get an
(24:48):
R rating. How could you? How could you do it
without getting an unrated film which nobody wants to release. Yeah. Yeah,
there's a lot of graphic content, and they're particularly in Inferno.
But then there's also some just and stuff, like a
demon playing a trumpet with its butt. That's great poppy satan,
poppy satan. Yeah, nobody knows what it means. It's great.
Oh man, that could be a fun episode. Sometimes untranslatable phrases.
(25:12):
Uh well, okay, whatever is going on in Hell. As
we've discussed, there is sometimes red, orange, yellow snow in
the real world. But dust particles are not the only
scientific explanation for multicolored snow that sometimes looks like it
might be bleeding or full of vomit, or full of
something else gross, full of full of vile from the underworld,
(25:34):
because sometimes snow itself is actually an ecosystem. Yeah, this
is really phenomenal, and it in a way it ties
in nicely with Hell because you have essentially organic material
serving as the nuclad right. So, as explored in the
Scientific American article Wonderful Things, colon, don't eat the pink snow.
(25:57):
You have to consider numerous different species of snow algae,
including one particular one of note here, and that's the
green alergae species uh Clamo Dominus novellis. It's a green
cryophilic cryots that means it likes ice or likes cold,
likes the cold, likes the ice. Cryophilic algae that thrives
in freezing water and at the center of a snowflake.
(26:19):
Its zygote form depends on a red carrotinoid pigment to
protect it from u V bombardment. Oh wow, Yeah, when
ben beta carotene incidentally performs a similar duty absorbing u
V inside the human eye. So this has been something
just completely crazy and unique to this species. Yeah, so
this is a sort of would you call this an
extreme aphile? It seems like it would probably meet the
(26:41):
classification because, I mean, living in snow that's not a
very friendly environment, and you so one of the things
pointed out here is that it has to protect itself
from UVY bombardment. Living on snow is kind of like,
I don't know, if you wanted to just like live
on black asphalt or something. Uh, it's you're you're just
(27:01):
bombarded by the sunlight and I guess on the snow
it's reflecting black back because the snow is white. Um,
and then of course it's going to be very cold.
I can imagine that. It's where do you get your
your nutrients from if you need like mineral nutrients and
you're just sitting in the snow. That seems like a
nutrient poor environment. Yeah, it seems like a very rough
place to to carve out your your your little corner
(27:25):
of life, right, But apparently clamo dominos don't care. These uh,
these algae are I don't know they're they're they're tough
little buddies, but they do bring us a wonderful uh
site from time to time when people come across these
things and they're not prepared for it. They haven't read
these articles, they don't know exactly what it is. When
(27:45):
they encounter, for example, a snow bank on a mountain
side that just looks like it's full of blood, yeah,
or what happened here? Um? Or a delicious watermelon icy
that apparently they're often referred to as watermelon snows. Yeah,
when she scoop them up and taste it, well, I'll
I'll let you feel the eating of the watermelon snow.
(28:07):
But in terms of encountering it, you do tend to
encounter it on a permanent snowfields and sunny dry areas,
so the snow then ends up blushing, is melting, erosion
and evaporation occur, and then someone finds it and they say, hey,
maybe I'll have a bite of that. What happens. Well, apparently,
according to a couple of experts, it has significant laxative properties.
(28:30):
So the watermelon snow will will send you a run
into the nearest outhouse, which which may be especially troubling
if you're up in a mountain pass somewhere and it's
all bundled up for the winter, probably nowhere to go.
So pink snow probably begets uh, brown snow or black
snow depending. That's gross. Yeah, but but enough about brown snow.
(28:52):
How about how about a little blue snow for us?
We mentioned it earlier, you mentioned that blue snow. So
in February in the city of Tellia, Beans for Russia,
people started to see something alarming. It was bright blue snow.
And this is not just the way ice sometimes looks
like a powder blue and in the right kind of
light or the right kind of packing density of the ice.
(29:13):
I don't know. You've probably seen glaciers sometimes it look blue. Now,
this was snow that was bright blue, and easter egg
blue and blue. Just remind everyone blue is not a
color you encounter with tremendous frequency in the natural world.
Is the sky, yes, And and there's some that are
that we don't even see it that much in the sky. Uh,
(29:35):
a separate tangent that. But but yeah, in terms of
just finding oh this is this has the pigment blue
in it, you don't find it much. So Yeah, the
city in Russia, you've got this easter egg blue snow.
Residents claim that when they walk through the areas of
the blue snow, they experienced sore throats and could taste
a sweetness in the air. That's alarming. Uh. And Chillia
(29:56):
Ben unfortunately is no stranger to weird stuff falling from
the sky. They've had there a number of troubling events there.
One of them was that it was the part of
Russia that was closest to meteor event, the super Bowl
eight event, where a meteor from space inner Earth's atmosphere
at this really high velocity at a very shallow angle
(30:17):
and then exploded in a gigantic air bursts that was
brighter than the sun, and it shattered windows all throughout
the surrounding area, caused lots of injuries. It was a
serious meteorological or not meteorological, a serious space object event. Yeah.
And then I made some tremendous footage too, since so
(30:37):
many drivers in Russia have the dashboard cameras to protect themselves.
We ended up seeing this tremendous footage of this, uh,
this object searing across the sky. Yeah, so that they'd
had they'd had the sky explode just a couple of
years before, and then they got the blue snow. So
was the blue snow more doom from space? Probably not,
(31:00):
because in this case there was actually a fairly mundane
but still kind of creepy explanation. There was a local
food product manufacturer called Vtex, and they admitted through a
spokesperson that they essentially they had a spill. They had
a chemical spill. They spilled a bunch of powdered easter
egg die and the powdered die got into the ventilation
(31:21):
system and then it was expelled into the outside air
and eventually settled into the snow, dyeing it blue. That's all.
But apparently when you live in Russia, having weird colored
snow happens pretty frequently, I mean early, maybe not pretty frequently,
more frequently than than it seems to in other places,
(31:44):
because there are also stories of a Siberian city in
Russia having black snow blacks snow. Well that that of course,
that instantly brings to mind some possible explanations in terms
of just thinking, well, what sends black particles up into
the air burning? Of course of course, yeah, so it's
(32:07):
not the it's not the correlate of black sunshine, which
was my first guest. You know, you see black snow,
I'm thinking maybe they're filming a Mastodon music video nearby,
and so like, the snow is coming off the peaks
of Mountain Gloom Max and Caughton across wind. But but
it wasn't that, it wasn't a special effect. It was
an accidental byproduct of industry or actually we would say
(32:31):
not industry but power production. In this case, though it
happened in the Siberian city of Omsk, which is apparently
an industrial center. That the first story I heard about
this was in the Moscow Times, reported in December, and
they said in the Siberian city of twice in one
week the city was covered in black snow, and apparently
(32:52):
the locals were given lots of assurances the black snow
does not present a health risk, don't worry about the
black snow, just go about business. The best lead at
the time to explain it was that they said that
local prosecutors had begun they began investigating a couple of
local businesses. One was a coal producer and the other
(33:12):
one was a thermal power station known as Thermal Power
Station Number five. And then they reported again this was
also in the Moscow Times in February, that the black
snow was back. It was back in in skin. This
time they reported that it was traceable to air pollution
from the city's thermal and electrical power plants. So apparently,
when it's very cold, the coldest times of the year,
(33:36):
they really crank up the engines at the thermal power
plants and this causes extra unfiltered atmospheric pollutants to get
out into the air condense and then fall down in
the snow and cover the city in this this scary
black snow that reminds me of some of the some
of the ideas I've read about a theoretical nuclear winter
(33:59):
in which you've had multiple nuclear devices detonate over large
population centers, and of course it ends up uh possibly
serving as a sarcophagus for the earth um and preventing
the sunlight from from warming the world as it should.
But I've also read that you would have. You might
have so much material burnt up in those cities, those
(34:20):
centers of population, both people and just buildings and life
itself there, that you would have black or gray snows falling,
just the ash from those incinerations. Thanks for cheering us.
Uh yeah. So anyway, the thermal power station involved in
the story said they said they'd get a new filter. Okay,
(34:42):
all right, just turns out, yeah, we need a new filter.
We'll get that replaced. Okay. So we've talked about the
many colors of snow that sometimes crop up on Earth,
but it's all still Earth snow. We've mentioned hell snow
a little bit, but but I want to hear about
some real alien snow, Like, does it snow on Mars?
Does it snow on other planets? What what happens beyond
(35:04):
the bounds of our little blue marble. Well, here's what
we know, um, and I'm just gonna go through some
some planets here, some also some some moons in our
solar system and discuss just what might be falling that
at least resembles snow. Okay, let's start with Mars. We
already know what's going on in Earth, but on Mars,
in the polar regions, you'll find carbon dioxide crystal snow. Uh,
(35:28):
but not in the form of traditional snowflakes, but more
in the form of cubo octahedrons. And so these are
these are they have eight triangular faces and six square faces. Okay, wait, wait,
hold on, So it carbon dioxide snow. That would mean
it's snowing dry ice, right if dry ice is frozen
carbon dioxide, essentially, Yeah, that's that's my reta. That's messed up.
(35:53):
But if you go on on over to Jupiter, if
you visit the Jovian moon Io, you'll find sulfur dioxide snow. Okay,
So molten sulfur blasts out of the Moon's many active volcanoes,
it freezes in space and it falls back down as
as fluffy yellow snow. That's sick. I Owe is a
really cool moon, by the way, Everybody, when whenever people
(36:16):
are talking about the moons of Jupiter, Europa gets all
the attention because it's got those subterranean oceans. You think
you might find life there or something like that. But
but i Owe is worth a look. It is a
volatile volcanic hellscape of a planet that's really beautiful and
very interesting. Indeed. Now, if you head on out the Saturn,
(36:36):
you can visit in Sladus, and here you'll find water
and ammonious snow, thanks to water and ammonia geysers in
the south polar region that blast their content hundreds of
miles into space, so far that most of it doesn't
even come back down again. It leaves in Sladus and
eventually for forms part of Saturn's e ring. But what
(36:58):
whatever doesn't venture out to the ear ring falls back
down as powdery snow. And this is crazy. The snow
doesn't accumulate with any real degree of speed, but it's
been falling so long in certain regions of Enceladus for
millions of years, So in places we suspect that you
have hundred meter deep um snow drifts of this water
(37:22):
and ammonious snow. So what would happen if you landed
on one of those snow drifts? Would you just sink
into it? Ah? Don't? Yeah? Maybe because it's supposedly pretty
powdery stuff. Yeah I wouldn't. I don't. I don't. I
don't think the sense that it would be particularly packed.
All right, if we head on out a little further
into the Solar system, will visit Neptune, specifically, will visit
(37:44):
the Neptunian Neptunian moon Triton. All right, and here nitrogen
and methane snow falls in the southern polar region. Uh.
And it's pink snow. So potentially this this could be
what's going on in the cat and Hat comes back. Now,
will it give you the runs? Um? I don't think
it would have. Uh. I don't think it would be
(38:06):
good for you. I would not eat it if you
visit Triton in the foreseef the future. Uh. It's also
worth noting that this snow is also caused by geysers,
so similar to what we've talked about on on Enceladus.
And then finally, if you venture out the Pluto, you
might get some snow there as well. Hubble space telescope
(38:28):
findings originally suggested that that the Pluto experiences snows of nitrogen,
methane and possibly carbon monoxide, and New Horizons are recent
evidence seems to support the idea. But but we're talking
a pretty pretty distant location in our solar system here. Yeah.
I remember reading about that when the New Horizons data
(38:50):
was first coming back, that they were they were talking
about what types of particles you would have falling down
on the surface of Pluto, which again was one of
the things that surprised me about Pluto, but because I
guess for some reason, I thought of it as just
absolutely dead. Yeah, just like a place kind of like
the Moon where just not much is going on. Yeah.
I feel like our idea of of Pluto has been
(39:11):
so reduced in recent years, given our increased knowledge about
what's there and what might be there, that we just
we don't think of it having any kind of systems
in place. You just think of it is this dead rock. Yeah,
but but not so. The new findings about Pluto from
New Horizons are very interesting, all right, Joe. We just
traveled pretty far away from from Earth, all the way
(39:33):
out to to the to the far reaches of our
solar system. So it makes sense that at this point
in the podcast, we've moved, we've moved further and further
away from our original starting point. Let's get into some
conspiracy theories about snow, which, oh, this was also new
to me. I really didn't think about the fact that
there would be conspiracy theories about the content of our snow.
(39:56):
Of course, there are because they're they're always conspiracy theories
about whether for some reason, whether is a big thing
and conspiracy thing. Really, yeah, anytime there's a strange weather event,
and so of course big snowstorms are no different. There
have been conspiracy theories about snow storms, and one of
them is the Atlanta Snowmageddon that happened in January. We're
(40:18):
bringing it all back home, so if you don't know,
Robert and Kristen and I we record out of Atlanta, Georgia,
and in January, Atlanta, Georgia was essentially smashed into pieces
by two inches of snow. Yeah, just completely shut down.
Um and a lot of it had to do with
(40:39):
this preparation for it and how everyone, Includingland City responded
initially in terms of shutting things down, the fact that
there are more cars in Atlanta than there are atoms.
I mean, it was a big problem. The freeways were
jammed with cars that were stuck in the snow. People
were freaking out of it, trying to trying to find
ways to get home. A lot of people couldn't. They
(41:01):
were stuck in a McDonald's overnight or something like that.
I mean, it was a it was a big problem.
I don't know what happened to you, Robert did Did
you get home? All right? Yeah? We we didn't have
any problem. Uh we were just at home with our
son during that time, and uh he was just amazed
by the snow and didn't really like going out in it.
(41:23):
But uh, yeah, I was very lucky too. It was
very fortunate I got home and didn't really encounter any
major problems. But we all, I think we all knew
people who were either stuck at work or stuck you know,
even worse somewhere between work and home, or caught at
the airport. They were just like everybody had it, had
those stories at least in their initial orbit. Yeah. But
(41:44):
for a lot of people, this was not just a
major uh does that a major you know weather event
and problem in the city. It was a big wake
up sheep all moment. You know. They were like, get
your kids to stop making snow angels because that snow
is fake and it's c I a satanism. Huh Okay, well,
(42:06):
well let's hear this. Let's hear that the argument for
why Atlanta was subjected to fake snow and how how
would you even know? How do you prove that this
is fake snow as opposed to real snow. Well, the
general principle behind this conspiracy theory might be older, but
a wave of videos emerged in the winner of and
the standard setup goes like this. A guy gets his camera,
(42:28):
he goes outside, and he scoops up some snow from
his yard, and he brings it inside and he rolls
it in his palm to pack it into a little
snowball or a little snow tube, and then he holds
a cigarette lighter up to it, and much to our surprise,
the snow does not melt into water and drip away,
or at least not as fast as we would expect.
(42:51):
Instead of liquefying and dripping onto the floor. The part
of the snow exposed to the lighter looks like it
kind of collapses in on itself, and then it turns
gray or black. And then the narrator observes that the
snow must be fake plastic, toxic chemicals, harp juice, geoengineering nanoparticles.
(43:12):
You know about HARP, M not sure I do. It's
a radio transmission research project up in Alaska that a
lot of conspiracy theorists think is I don't know, being
used to create earthquakes or create bad weather events at
more these weather conspiracs. Okay, so it's a conspiracy theory
touchdown area, Yeah yeah, yeah, so they think it's it's
(43:33):
has something to do with that, or it's chem trails,
or it's geoengineering nanoparticles or nano robots or some other
evil substance. Uh, and then they exhort yonder sheeple to awaken. Okay,
what what's the motive? Not quite sure? I mean, was
it just like there were some Yankee scientists who are
trying to make it Landol look foolish by shutting down
(43:54):
the city with two inches of fake snow. That was
one of the results. That's yeah, I don't know, but anyway,
several be some sort of corporate espionage thing because you
end up shutting down the city economically, So maybe there
was some hidden nefarious purpose there. I suppose we'll never know.
But anyway, so there are several scientists and skeptics who
(44:15):
took a crack at this to see what was going on.
The first observation, it obviously wasn't a conspiracy to cripple
Atlanta or the Southeast in particular with this stuff, because
people from other regions burned their snowballs with cigarette lighters
and got the same result. So if this is a conspiracy,
it's a global conspiracy. This is probably more a situation
(44:36):
of most people don't try to burn snowballs, and and
surprisingly the result of trying to burn snow snowballs is
different than you might expect. Right, that's exactly what's going on.
So what is happening with the snow? Why does it
do this? Uh? First of all, why doesn't it drip?
You would you would expect, I mean I certainly intuitively
would have expected if you hold a lighter up to
(44:57):
a snowball, it's gonna drip water all over the floor.
And that does That doesn't seem to happen. Here's the explanation.
Freshly fallen snow is like nine to nine air, Okay,
So and this is the reason why snow. You know,
you have some animals that will dig a snow cave
(45:19):
for insulation from the cold, and you think like, wait,
how can that protect them from the cold if they're
in the snow? Yeah, totally true. So the snow has
a lot of gaps in it, and with all these
little pockets of air in it, the air can't really
move around, and it ends up creating a good insulation
layer between the what's going on inside and the heat
(45:41):
from the outside. Anyway, it's not very dense, so snow,
even packed snow packed into a snowball, is less dense
than ice or liquid water. It's kind of like wool
or any other loose solid material. It's full of wonderful
little pockets and tunnels and spaces for liqu water to
be absorbed. And so when you hold a lighter up
(46:05):
to a snowball and melt the water, the water is melting,
the ice is melting and turning into liquid water, but
it's being absorbed up into all those pockets in the snowball,
those little holes and places for liquid water to go. Okay,
So it's not like just how it would be like
holding the lighter up to a chunk of ice, for instance, right,
And it's true, if you hold a lighter up to
(46:26):
a chunk of ice, it'll drip. The snowball doesn't drip
very much. What's the explanation though, for the blackening? That's
the really weird thing and holding a lighter, holding a
cigarette lighter up to a snowball and then the snowball
appears to get scorched, it turns gray or black. I mean,
water isn't supposed to get scorched. That doesn't happen, and
it's true the water is in fact not getting scorched.
(46:48):
What's going on here is that the lighters that people
are using in these videos are standard butane lighters. The
fuel is butane, which is a hydrocarbon fuel. It's C
four H tin, and it does doesn't always burned with
perfect efficiency. C four H tin reacts in a combustion
reaction with oxygen that creates C O two so carbon
dioxide and then water H two oh. But it also
(47:11):
sometimes produces a pollutant byproduct to the fact that it
doesn't burn perfectly clean. And these are extra carbon particles.
The carbon particles are black, and we call them soot. Okay,
so we kind of get down to the black snow
situation we had earlier with the power plant pumping up
a bunch of black foot into the atmosphere. Exactly. Yeah,
(47:31):
So you're what's going on when you're snowball turns black
when you cook it with the lighter. Is not that
the snow is turning black. You are polluting the snowball
with soot from the lighter you're using. The soot collects
on the clean white snowball and stains at a darker color.
So here's the real conspiracy theory deathblow. People said, well,
(47:55):
what if we heat the snowball in a different way
than with a lighter, like if we put it in
a bowl in the microwave or in a pan on
the stove, And what do you know? It melted into
regular water just fine. Uh. Though in the pan, an
interesting thing that you can see happen is that the
part of the snowball that's touching the pan on the bottom,
it begins to melt first, and then the rest of
(48:17):
the snowball absorbs the liquid water. You can see the
water level of flowing up as if by capillary action
into the snowball above it. And uh and there you
pretty much have what's going on. And this gives us
a new activity to enjoy on on snow days this year. Yeah,
frying snowballs is that is now? That's got to be
(48:41):
the next big state fair food. Right. They've got they've
got they've got deep fried Snickers bars, deep fried kool aid,
And the next thing is going to be deep fried
snow maybe. Well, I mean you did fried ice cream, right,
I've never had that? What what do you do with that?
How does it not melt? I think it's well, it's
(49:02):
been a long time since I've had it. I seem
to recall that it is, uh like really cold ice cream,
and it's just fried so quickly that it's the ice
cream is melting as you open it up. But it's
been it's been a long time since I had it. Likewise,
it's been a long time since I've had us. You know,
what do you what do you call it when you
just had sugar to the snow and you eat it?
(49:23):
Snow cone? Well, I guess you could call it that.
We had we called it something different though as a kid, Oh,
snow cone is a good analogy for what's going on here. Actually,
if you pour the syrup into a snow cone, yeah,
it's absorbed into the snow. The yeah. But anyway. One
of one of the best sources I found on this
was the was the astronomer and skeptic blogger Phil plates
(49:44):
blog posts over its slate Bad Astronomy, Yeah, yeah, bad astronomer.
He he had a really good breakdown of exactly what's
going on, and I think he has the most thorough
explanation of of exactly why this is not snow you
should be worried about. Okay, alright, So so, in other words,
when it comes to generating conspiracy theories about the next
(50:04):
big snowfall, look elsewhere. We've already we've already thoroughly explained
the fake snow, the blackening snow, the snow that won't melt.
On the other hand, as our as our several lessons
from Siberia have taught us, if you do see snow
that seems to be laden with chemicals, it's entirely possible
(50:24):
that this is some kind of weird industrial byproduct or
otherwise not good snow and might be worth bringing to
somebody's attention. So it's possible that that not all snow
is good snow. Yeah, and yeah, and if it's a
strange color, you maybe think twice before you attempt to
deep fry it for the fair. So they have it
some weird snow, some space snow, some multicolored snow, some
(50:48):
evil snow. Yeah, So there's a little more material for
you to think about when when the white stuff starts falling.
This winter on you and you begin to wonder if
you're going to school or work the next morning. Okay, so, honestly,
do you think we're going to get any snow here
in Atlanta this year? Ba's on what we've seen so far,
I would say no. I would say this year is off.
(51:08):
But you know, so the way things have been going
recently with the crazy weathered patterns, maybe we'll get in July. Yeah,
who knows? Yeah, all right, that's it. In the meantime,
if you want to check out more episodes again, head
on over the stuff Blow your Mind dot com. That's
where you find all the podcast episodes. You find videos,
you'll find blog posts, will find links to social media
account such as uh our, Twitter and Facebook. We'll blow
(51:29):
the mind on both of those were Stuff to Blow
your Mind on Tumbler, And if you want to get
in touch with us with your favorite science facts about
snow or your weirdest personal snow story, you can email
us and blow the mind at how stuff works dot com.
(51:51):
For more on this and pathans of other topics. Is
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