Snow Hydrology (SNOW & AVALANCHES) with Ned Bair

Oh hey, it's that blueberry bagel that tastes like onions because it pressed its face into an everything bagel. Alie Ward back with another episode of Ologies. It's the middle of January and here in the Northern Hemisphere, lips are chopped, feet are cold, Parkers are on. I'm here to give you a snow job. But first, thank you to everyone who supports on Patreon and who gets merch, including the

So?

I searched far and wide for a snow expert, and I connected with a dude who got his PhD in Environmental Science and Management from the University of California, Santa Barbara up place Stephen Ray Morris and I both attended. But this guy is primarily based up near Mammoth Mountain, which is technically a giant lava dome complex Frickin Volcano near Yosemite. It's chill. He does not live in la because hello, there's snow snow here, but he would be

Hi dad?

And where did you grow up? Because you're based in Santa Barbara or you work out of UCSB? I do?

I work for UCSB? Yep? I with lakes?

And where are you from?

Originally Alexandria, Virginia.

Do they have snow there?

No?

Oh, how did this happen?

Yeah?

I grew up skiing in winter Green, Virginia, m a thousand vertical feet something like thirty inches of annual snowfall. I went to school in Maine, went to bat in college and skied more there. And then after college, I went and my parents weren't too happy about this and became a ski patroller and did that for ten years.

So they like, can you not break all of your bones?

Yeah?

Well that's not really what they wanted me to go to college to do.

And yeah, it's not the safest job either, but I loved it.

I mean, have you been called a ski bum by your family?

Yeah? Yeah, I've definitely. Yeah.

I've always said that I've wanted to live in a ski town for as long as I can remember, and so I've sort of managed to do that with a professional career. I woint of traveling in a fair bit, but also just a lot of time on the computer.

How did you make the leap from being ski patrol for you said ten years to do you have a PhD in snow hydrology. How did you go from like, you know, air quote ski bum to doctor snow dude.

So it's kind of a long story.

But I was working as a patroller and my second so was part of that was I was doing my PhD while I was still ski patrolling at the end. But I had a friend on ski patrol who is sort of a mentor for me. His name was Walter Rosenthal. He was he was an old patroller, is in his mid fifties, and he kind of took me under his wing and taught me a lot about snow and digging these massive snow pits, you know, like three Sierra snowpack because this is really deep.

At least in the.

Good it varies, but it can be very deep. And so we would be digging these pits and doing these you know, crystal identification and stuff like that, I mean really deep.

And he just was a really he loved it. I mean he was a guy.

He's probably one of the only people I've ever met, I think, liked to dig more in the snow to do anything else.

So he's kind of like a human backo. And anyway, so Walter was.

My friend on ski patrol, and he taught me a lot about the snow and I was patrolling and I was kind of looking for something a little more cerebral to do, you know. I loved working as a ski patroller. I should say this. Walter had a history. He was a scientist. Also also worked at e C. Santa Barbara, and he had done a bunch of work with remote sensing and satellite based mapping at the snowpack and stuff

For in the US. Really, it's what I like to do.

It's what I wrote my dissertation on, right, And so anyway, Walter got an NSF grant with his advisor, Jeff Doser to study centering mechanisms in the snowpack, so like how snow grains bond together. He was looking at soluble impurities in the snowpack and using a scanning electron microscope and looking at the geometric struct sure and how the next form between him.

And stuff like that.

Anyway, Walter just got this NSF grant and then in April of two thousand and six, he was killed with three other ski patrollers when a volcanic event on Mammoth Mountain collapsed.

Oh my god.

Yeah, and it was it was. It was a really rough ty it actually it happened right next to me. I was there when it happened, and he was actually killed trying to rescue the other patrollers. So it was really Uh yeah, it was a tough, a tough time in my life. Not an experience that I, you know, had a really hard time getting over. But anyway, Walter's advisor, Jeff came to me and asked me if I wanted to go to grad school on this NSF grant. Wow, no longer had a PhD student to do the research.

What an impact that must have had on you?

It did, it had.

It had a pretty big impact on me. After college. I was a ski patroller and I was a climbing guide, and I was kind of a climbing bomb ski bump, and I pretty soon after that got married and you know, I started living, not living out of my truck as much anyway.

And yeah, now I have two little kids and it was a tough experience.

I guess I should mention so James Juarez and Scott mcandrew's or the two other patrollers who were killed.

Well fencing off the area from skiers, Scotty and James fell through the snow twenty feet into the volcanic vent, and Walter, who wasn't supposed to be working but had returned because of the storm, went after Scotty and James to save them. All three died of asphyxiation in the volcanic gases, namely the heavier CO two. Several others were injured in the rescue efforts. And I just learned that when volcanic gases reach noxious strengths, they're called a muzuku,

So if you ever ski at Mammoth Mountain, there's a I think called a fumarole that's on the Chair three area and its spews out volcanic gases, hydrogen sulfide, which is really toxic, lots of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and it's sort of fine if it's not capped over, if it's open and it's venting. But this year was a really large snow year. This was April of two thousand and six, and so it actually capped over for the first time that a lot of people who've been there

There are tons of videos on YouTube of skiers and snowboarders stopping at this fenced off plume to just wonder at it, and many pay their respects, and a Stowe memorial is up at Mammoths Summit to remember the three and even ten years after the incident, hundreds gathered at Mammoth to observe the anniversary. The community is still pretty

I think both. I don't know, it's sort of a complicated question.

I don't know.

I wasn't going to change my life radically and you know, go off and live in a city and do that.

I wouldn't have been happy doing that.

But yeah, it certainly made me think a lot about the mountains and taking risks. This snowbridge collapsed right next to me. It was a couple of feet away, so it could have very easily been me falling in for the fumarole.

So wow, yeah, and you're a young person too, I mean, yeah.

Yeah, I was this. I was twenty six.

Yeah, yeah, And so what is it about snow that you that you love? What keeps bringing you back to it?

Well, you know, growing up, it was always sort of an federal thing, and I didn't get to see it very much. And I think I think all kids, you know, love snow. It's obviously no school and at least in the DC area, so it has nice early memories and impressions for me. I think later on, well, I love the avalanche part of it. I think the avalanche world is fascinating and there are a lot of avenues that haven't been explored scientifically.

So I note this is where I found out what ski patrolling means. I honestly, I thought it was just like buzzing around the slopes, kind of making sure everyone's okay, kind of like a lifeguard, but with no speedos and more skis. Turns out I did not know anything about ski patrolling.

You go out with explosives and you set off avalanches and wait, throw dynamite out your hand.

Oh I didn't know that. Yeah, I thought you were just making sure no one failed.

No, no, no, no, no, you do active avalanche control. Yeah, so you shoot howitzers and oh my god, I throw dynamite, and so it's fun how.

It served, By the way, is a freaking World War two cannon, you guys, It's a cannon. To look it up.

Yeah, these avalanches are very difficult to predict, and it's not always so clear what causes a really large one versus a small one. And you know, they're just sort of spectacular too, I mean, just the size of the debris and the large blocks and damage you know that they can cause. And you can see all kinds of markings on you know, mostly in the Sierra and most of the United States, most of these happened in wilderness areas, so that the marketing, you know, it's trees that are destroyed,

This is no joke. Each year around one hundred people are killed by alpine avalanches, but due to really crazy snowfall lately, twenty six lives have been lost just this past month. Just a few days ago, two ski patrollers in France were killed detonating explosives to trigger an avalanche. So the shit is risky. Are there How many avalanches are there in Manma per year?

Do you think in Mammoth? I don't know. A couple thousand.

Really, Oh my god, I had no idea.

Yeah, I mean because you know that when they're triggered like that, you have a lot more of them throughout the US.

I don't know, one hundred thousand a year or something like that.

What's the death toll there.

Well, it's been going down. It's in sort of the mid twenties. It's actually been sort of staying steady or going down, which is probably due to a number of factors. Airbags, better education, better awareness. The avalanche centers do a great job with warning people during those high snowfall periods and other times when you know the metamorphism has produced layering that's unstable.

Wow. Okay, more on those airbags in a bit. As for avalanches, these metamorphosisms in layering just mean that there's less stability with a snowshelf depending on what kind of layers are underneath it. So maybe some wetter, warmer snow or a layer of refrozen ice kind of stacking and stacking,

So yeah, they're exciting, But then also just snow is a really fascinating material. As Walter always used to say, snow is hot, and which means that it's very close to its melting temperature almost everywhere on Earth. Oh wow, you know, because it's pretty warm compared to like the rest of the planets in our Solar system, and well at least the ones past Earth.

Going back to a really basic question, what is snow? What's the deal with snowflakes? Are they all unique? Like? If I know nothing about snow, what are the basics? I know it's a stupid question, but I don't care.

My advisor, Jeff Doser, he had a thing where he went to Disney for the Frozen movie. They had salting work where he showed up and give him some pointers on snowflakes, which I thought were pretty good. And actually and Carl Barkland, who's actually also on my PhD committee, and I thought between them they had some pretty good points.

Are you ready for this beautiful icy point. It's gonna melt your brains.

Jeff made the point that snowflakes, you know, they grow by accretion, meaning that there's like condensation, nuclei dust they grow out of that. So you can't have ones with holes in the middle, which you see a lot, especially around now when people are making snowflake decorations for Christmas. So no holes in the middle. They have to have six sides. Okay, no pentagons or you know anything like that, right, they go from six sided hexagonal water crystals.

So for kindergartener is out there making a paper snowflake with a hole in the middle, definitely yell at them, just mercilessly, because frankly, they're never going to learn otherwise, humiliate them. Don't do that. Also for a four second

So Carl also made the point that you cannot yell and cause of snow avalanche, Okay, doesn't happen like I guess it happened in the movie Heidi.

Okay, I just spent like an hour digging all over for this Heidi clip. But he may have been thinking of another mountain movie, which incidentally, and I love Lucy episode cited.

Now, don't make a sound, sat all that snow hanging over our heads a loud noise to cause an avalanche. It's true.

I read it in a book and you remember that picture Seven Brides for seven Brothers.

Yeah, that's right.

Somebody shot a pistol caused a great, big avalanche. Yeah, now, don't anybody move, Okay. Also, I went and looked up seven Brides for seven Brothers, and from what I can gather, it involves a bunch of related horny frontiersmen who romantically straight up kidnap women. So I feel like, yes, this pistol triggering an avalanche plot point is problematic, but not as much as it's kind of lighthearted, musical take on human trafficking.

I guess you went to try and stop that urban rural legend from perpetuating.

So that's a big debunker of flim flam. That's flim flam. You can't scream and cause an avalanche, Nope, Okay, to scream your head off in the mountains if you need to, Uh, yes, okay, good to know. Sometimes that's why you go to the mountains. It's just to scream your head off. Yeah, and then you go back and you say everything's fine.

Yeah, right, So.

Okay, snow. Where does snow form in the atmosphere? Does it form right above our heads? Does it form way above us?

Like?

Where when does it? How does a snowflake become a snowflake?

Yeah? Pretty high up.

I mean it depends on the level of the clouds and you know how deep the storm is and where the moisture is. But yeah, I mean, this is all the lower atmosphere if you're an atmospheric scientist, But for people like me, study what's going on in the ground at pretty high up klometers above our heads. And it starts off frozen actually because it's cold up there, but it turns to raine if it's.

Not cold enough so to recap water vapor and cold temperatures, turns to ice crystals around a piece of dust or pollen aka condensation nuclei, and then it falls through the air and tumbles and grows, and in warmer air it'll melt a little at the edges and form clumps with other flakes, resulting in heavier, wet, fluffy snow. And if it falls through colder air, it's less likely to stick together and it falls as smaller, drier and powdery snow.

Yes, you can find snowflakes that are pretty similar, okay, you know, but they all grow by this pretty complex accretion process where there's just a lot of water vapor condensing. It's called deposition when it's going straight from vapor to

Wilson Bentley of Vermont by the Bye was a pioneer in the fields of teeny tiny weather photography and snapped his first snowflake picture in the late eighteen eighties by attaching a camera to a microscope. And he famously was the one that argued that no two snow crystals were alike. And then he died at the age of sixty six after walking six miles in a blizzard. Oh Man, snow is a bitchy mistress. But what makes all of these glimmering icy flakes so fancy?

It has to do with the temperature and the super satuation, So like relative humidity, you get sort of a different snowflake form. And they can be anything from you know, dendrites like the classic snowflake, to like needles, to capped columns to there's a number of different sectored plates. I didn't know that Ken Libreckt has a nice book of coffee table book of snowflakes.

Okay, So, Ken Lebreck is a Caltech physics professor who is probably the world's best snowflakehotographer, Like he can say, hands down, it's him now. Among his many books are Snowflakes, Winter's Frozen Artistry, and Ken le Breck's Field Guide to Snowflakes.

You thought about that?

You know?

It doesn't bother me.

I mean, I guess you know it makes sense, right, I mean, it's a funny question, like the classic snowflake that we were talking about the dendrite. Right, those are delicate and they do fracture and break apart easily. That's not so much the case in the Sierra, for instance, or most mountain ranges where it's windy. The snow that falls there, well, for one thing, it's not really falling, it's usually coming sideways because the winds are so strong.

Kind of like how at the beginning of the night you might be perfectly orderly, just a complex and symmetrical vision, but then maybe it's one am and one shoe broke and an eyelash fell off and you got redeposited at a diner instead of a dis go, if you will.

So, yeah, snowflakes they can actually be pretty durable. And they look different like those ones are. You know, they're small, they're like little specks, you know, versus larger you know, all snowflakes probably look smaller to people, but right they some are much much smaller. You know, like an order of magnitude smaller, especially when they're disaggregated like that.

And then what's happening with a hailstone? What's the difference there?

So a hailstone is something that's liquid, but then because of updraft, it comes back up and is refrozen and it's usual turbulence and yeah, wow.

So it's a rain drop. It almost hits the ground and then it's like nope, a head up to the clouds. Yeah, hailstorms I just learned, are different from grapple, which is when super cooled water forms around a snowflake and it looks like hail, but it's not. Kind of like a ball of ice made up of tiny balls of ice encasing symmetrical ice crystals that formed around a speck of something. It's just layers and layers.

Of drawn huh.

And then at the center of each snowflake, is there a speck of dust?

Uh, there's some kind of condensation nuclear it could be like salt, but yeah, it's basically dust for the most part.

And then let's get back a little bit to your patrol days and avalanches and so what is causing an avalanche? How much snowpack do you have to have to cause an avalanche, and what is it? Essentially? Is it a shelf of snow that just slips off a mountain? That was an avalanche of questions. I'm sorry.

Ground is pretty much always right around freezing, so you know, zero centigrade thirty two fahrenheit, But the snow surface can really vary, in fact, right at the surfaces where all the radiative transfer takes place, so that it can get really cold.

You're like, quick, let me look at your notes on radiative transfer. But I gotta admit, dog, I just copied these off Wikipedia's test. But okay. Radiative transfer is the physical phenomenon of energy transfer in the form of electromagnetic radiation. So the surface of the snow can melt and then get very cold again. I think that's what that means.

That can grow different crystals. So that's where you can get snow that changes once it's on the ground. It becomes weaker because of the metamorphic process, and there's all kinds of different ones. And also new snow is just it's much weaker than older snow typically, and so if you're on a steep enough slope, it ca an avalanche. But there's a lot to the avalanche. It has to form a slab, which is like a sort of cohesive

So what causes most avalanches if not people screaming at them?

Well, new snow, I mean, and this goes back to Manti Atwater and the fifties. There's ten contributory factors.

Okay, So side note. Montgomery Atwater of Alta, Colorado is the granddaddy of avalanche research. He is the dude. He's also the first one who thought, well, holy hell shit, let's launch small missiles at a mountain to make controlled avalanches happen. Everyone's like Monty dope idea. Now his was

We've known this for a long time.

It's when you have new snow, especially a lot of new snow, it stresses the snowback. That's when you get adeline. There's other things, you know, skiers. I mean, it's stress, really, is what it is.

Skiers.

You can exert stress through what's called the stress ball. They're affecting this weak layers. But yeah, the avalanche hazard really goes up with a lot of new snow.

And so tell me a little bit about your work blowing up these shelves of ice.

So when I was a ski patroller, and ski patrollers all across the country and all across the world do this every time it snows. And you know a significant amount in big ski resorts in the Western US and the Alps all over they throw explosives at the snow pack to trigger avalanches so that they don't come down

And a lot of time nothing happens.

But oh my god, what does that sound like? The whole shebang?

Oh? It's very loud.

Yeah, and you want to watch out and damage that you don't make sure that you you try to cover your ears as well as you can, but of course you need, you know, to be able to talk on the radio and stuff like that, so it's hard to totally keep your ears plugged all the time.

What does an avalanche sound like itself?

Yeah? I get that question a lot. Usually there's silent what yeah, I mean.

So I've talked about this with other people who've seen bigger avalanches than I have, and they say that you can hear them when they're really big. Especially a lot of times, like when they're breaking stuff, you hear the stuff that they're breaking, like the trees.

There's a lot of friction being you know.

Down frictional heating and stuff with these massive avalanches. But yeah, like most avalanches, there's size scale like one to five, say for destructive size.

And you know, most of the.

Avalanches I've seen or destructive size three maybe two to three and pretty silent.

Oh my gosh. And then have you ever triggered one that surprised you, that was like, oh, that was bigger than I thought.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I got caught in a couple of them as a ski patroller. And it's just one of the you know, hazards of the job. I think a lot of the public, I don't know what sort of risks ski patrollers are subjecting themselves to to get that mountain open. You know, it can be really dangerous because for one thing, after done with the explosives, a lot of the slopes will be ski cut ps.

I did have to look up what ski cutting is, and it's when a ski patroller intentionally skis across a dangerous pocket to maybe start an avalanche, aka in actual nightmare. They do actual nightmares? Did I mention? They're not just like hanging out in case you need a band aid.

To clean up.

And there's some places you don't want to ski cut, and you won't ski cut, but sometimes there's just little pockets that have to be dealt with. There's sort of a systematic process for doing that. But it means you're you know, inexposed. You you can be really exposed. And that's how I've gotten caught in the few avalanches that I've been in, has always.

Been ski cutting.

Did you dig your way out?

You know?

I didn't get fully buried, so mostly just went for a ride, you know, a couple hundred feet like buried up to my waist that kind of thing. Oh man, So yeah, but you know I never got hurt in an avalanche.

That was just like a Tuesday at the office.

For you, I guess. Yeah. It's a hard thing with the ski cutting.

You know, it's kind of a controversial practice, but you know, if you really think about it, it's it's something that you can't get away from as a ski patroller.

I mean, there's certain areas they're always gonna have to ski cut.

So oh man, what do you do? To warm up when you've done this. Is it Is there part of working in snow that involves going to a lodge and drinking cocoa or is that just a fantasy that I have.

Yeah, well, it depends on where you are. I mean when I was keep patrolling, there's ski patrol shacks where you sit bump, which means you wait for like someone to get hurt and then you you know, and you try to keep one or two people up there at all times so that someone you because you want to go downhill to get people when you're out in the field for some of these you know, like doing snow research, like for instance, I'm involved in this NASA snowex experiment,

And what is the research that you're doing right now? Focus on?

Okay, So what I do now is I do a large scale hydrologic and remote sensing work. So I'm doing snowpack astimates across large areas and concentrating in high mountain Asia, in particularly in the western parts of high mountain Asia, like Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Upper Indus River, which is huge source of drinking water, particularly like Afghanistan, and a lot of the Upper Indus shares of climatological similarities with California.

Yeah, it feeds the rivers.

Going back to the stuff about the spatial variability in the snowpack, it's it's a tough thing to figure out how much snow is up there. And the two big problems right are like how much is up there and how fast is it going to melt?

When's it going to melt?

But in a place like Afghanistan, there's no snowpack measurements, so the rivers will just go dry in September and it's a humanitarian crisis. And so we can we can kind of help out with that a little bit with the remote sensing by giving an idea of what sort of runoff to expect based on how much snow is up there, and that can be really useful for hu managed aid and lead lead times.

And stupid question. Favorite or least favorite movie about snow or ice or avalanches?

Least favorite or favorite?

Yeah, whatever, whatever you have a reaction to.

Oh, I'm trying to remember the name of the movie, but it was really bad. It was Josh Hartnett was in it and he got there's this guy who got lost off the back of Mammoth Mountain.

Okay, I looked into it and it was six degrees Miracle on the Mountain about a guy who loses this way I think math is involved, and then is like, maybe I'll clear my head shredding on some fresh powder. I said it away for a few days, enjoy the mountain. There always do any whosel A storm comes, but it's not just the winter that's harsh. This movie scored a twenty two with critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

I was not a big fan of this. This film went straight. I don't think it even made it to the theaters.

It's not orth.

Even I'm remembering. This happened while I was patrolling the made of movie out of it. There were wolves and there's like, you know there are no wolves and have sort of this terrible I mean not to. I think maybe a better filmmaker could have made the story more convincing anyway. But of course, my all time favorite movie is Aspect Extreme, which is a ski film from the mid nineties.

Sorr's about one hundred guys maybe to make until spring. Okay, so ask An Extreme from nineteen ninety three features cool dudes with borderline mullets, and as fate would have it, it too scored a twenty two percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

It's just more formative for me when I saw it because I was younger, and.

It's inspiring and inspiring.

Perhaps, Yeah, yeah, so I don't have you know, those are the two.

They just just off the top of my I mean, there's been a lot of you know, terrible ski movies that, yeah, people love, so I guess that's one of mine.

Okay, I have questions from listeners. Oh okay, you ready, sure, But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners, we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors. Why sponsors? You know what they do? They help us give money to charity of our ologists' choice,

Oh, that's a good question.

So the snow is white invisible wavelengths, because that's what we see in it's actually wouldn't be and if we could see into then you know, near infra red actually gets really dark, which is one way you can figure out what you're looking at. When you have a satellite or a spectrometer something that senses in multiple wavelengths, a multi spectral instrument. But it's white just because snow has a very low what's called the complex index of refraction,

Light that comes into it instead of absorb it.

Okay, and absorbing is what makes something dark, right, Right, the photons are coming in and they bounce around in the snowpack and then come back out.

And that's that's bright when.

You white because it's an all the wavelengths getting scattered back at you.

Ah, So it doesn't absorb it.

Well, that's right in the visible wavelengths. Yeah, got it exactly.

Ah, there we go. A ton of people had avalanche questions, obviously, and I will list them all in and aside because there's a lot of names. Okay, they are Tony Ben Venuti, all Off, Josh Key, Brooke Besone, Barbara Blackie Grace Gonzalez, Henry Strong, Wendy Fick, Christopher Enberer, Danny Bockheiser, Greer Nelson, Dustin Parish. Also, please remember we're sitting on a bench outside an airport, so do enjoy the ambient sounds of a few trucks rumbling passed. Also, his layover was almost up.

So I think the air avalanche airbags have.

Been a revolution in protective personal protective equipment is what they call it, which you know first key patroller used to be like CPR, mask and gloves and stuff, and now include helmets and avalanche air bags.

Interesting story about it.

The guy who invented the the air bag system ABS was a German hunter who had been in a couple avalanches.

One time.

He had a shamois, which is like a little European deer Oh wow, slung around his neck and you've rowed to the top of the avalanche and figure out, hey, this worked pretty well. And you thought it was a surface area thing. That's not quite right. It's an effect called inverse segregation. But it's the brazil nut effect. It's like shake a can of nuts and basically all the little nuts fill in the holes and make the big nut. The brazil nuts rise to the top huh.

And remember how ice floats in a glass. I also read that icy snow is less dense than your watery human body and so you'll sink in it fast. So having a large light air bag, which kind of looks like a U shaped pillow you'd use to take a nap on an airplane, but like four times as big, can float you right up to the top of the slide.

Or Yeah, airbags so so no, those are those are I think the biggest safety improvement that I've seen in my lifetime.

And I ski with an airbag.

It doesn't add too much weight, you know, it's like maybe four pounds extra or so in a pack.

Did you say he had a deer around his neck.

Yeah, shamoa is that a living deer? Dead one because he's a hunter? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, you.

Just ski with one of these.

No, no, okay, he was just bringing it home, you know.

Got it? Okay? I was like you just you just walk around with a live, cute deer on your Okay, that makes more sense.

But they're a little or too I don't know. I don't know too much about shamwaya.

Ps A shemois is a European goat antelope. Sam Wow m Maer and Cynthia Barts both had igloo questions. How can an igloo keep you warm when it's made of tiny frozen water droplets?

Yeah, So snow is actually a great insulator because it's got a lot of air in it. So if you think about it, any material that has a lot of air and it can kind of work as a good insulator. I mean sick of strawb ale or something like that. And so that's the idea, right, if you build up blocks like that, and also they keep out the wind. But yeah, it's actually a pretty good insulate. That's why snow sticks around for so long.

Oh, because there's so much air in it.

It's a good insulator.

I didn't know that. So if there were blocks of ice and igluo wouldn't be as warm but the snow because there's more air in the snow.

That's true.

Yeah, solid blocks of sea ice would not work as well, okay, although they would still provide shelter from the wind, which which helps a lot.

Okay. Also side note, I just learned that igloo in some Inuit languages can mean broadly a house or a home built out of any material, and that the snow house that's typically called an igloo actually has a much more specific name. And yes, linguists have studied a bunch of Arctic regional languages and yep, there's a ton of words for different kinds of snow. The Sami people of northern Scandinavia and Russia they got a thousand words just for reindeer. How boss is that also part in the

Yeah, it does.

I mean it's all that stuff in the atmosphere and the condensation nuclei and all that stuff we're talking about. You know, you can definitely have impurities in the snowpack. And then we also you also get deposition from dust, for instance, on the snow. That's a big issue in the Western US, and so that's once it's on the ground.

These apocalyptic looking dust storms.

There's just other stuff, Especially the older and longer that the snow has been there, it tends to get stuff on top, like like there's an algae that grows on the snow, claiming Donnas.

In the vallis that snow boo?

Yeah? I think is it a it's a funk.

No, it's an algae I think anyway, make you sick if you eat too.

Much of it.

Side notes, So I look this up and it's called watermelon snow because of this pink blush that the algal blooms cost and it even smells like watermelon. But don't eat it now of course. Of course, just like snail, it's somehow popped up as an ingredient and way too expensive face serums because I don't know, maybe a drop of snow algae juice will make me look younger, so somebody loves me, and I don't die alone with my

Yeah, you're definitely better off melting it if you have fire or like a stove. I mean, that's pretty standard in most expeditions. You are, you know, getting it to go through that phase change. It does require a lot of energy, so it's not the most efficient way, but you are still getting the water. So yeah, if you're desperate, I mean, you can melt somebody. Yeah, it'll make it really cold.

So what if you have nothing to melt snow with? Okay, I spent way too long on survivalist message boards, and apparently if you have a canteen, you fill it up with snow and you tuck it between your layers of clothing and you let your body heat melt it such your body do it, or you can suck on small amounts of snow in a time. I just don't eat ice like it's pudding. Also, one thread said you could pee in a bucket of snow and just melt it that way,

Wait, I don't know. I don't know what a bomb cyclone is. Yeah, you got me there. It sounds bad. I think you'd want to talk to an atmospheric scientist that one.

Yeah, I'll look it up. It doesn't sound good.

Though, Okay, my friends, I look this up and a bomb cyclone is also known as explosive cyclogenesis, a weather bomb, meteorological bomb, explosive development, mid latitude cyclone, cyclone, bomb or bomba genesis, or snowmageddon or a nor'easter. Now, if you're counting linguists, that is ten English terms for just one kind of storm, and it means that the pressure drops a bunch at least twenty four millibars in a short

You know, I think they really help these ski resorts. The artificial snow helps the ski resorts maintain on more consistent product as they'd call it, I mean mammoth. They miss their opening day by one day this year for the first time since it installed snowmaking, and it's just one day since you know, in the early nineties, and so they can, you know, on the snow at all.

I was curious how these work, and I just watched a bunch of videos of huge hoses using compressed air or fans to blast tiny water droplets high up in the sky so that they freeze and then flutter down into powder. And apparently this can be an overnight job, kind of like the snow fairy comes at night in a beanie and a north face parka and unleashes its giant hose arm octopus creature to cover the mountain and

Yeah, I don't have any good answers. I mean, I don't like to use the salt because pets can and it sort of marks things. And I kind of enjoy it that. You know, It's like a good way to get some exercise when you're just stuck inside.

Right, it's CrossFit. Yeah, CrossFit, You got to watch your That's okay.

I think the main there's there is Uh.

They even teach in avalanche classes I think called strategic shoveling, which is more about how to most quickly extract people. Has to do with like tiered levels and stuff like that. You don't just want to dig straight into the ground. But just like any any working at your desk, there are.

Correct ways to sit.

It's correct ways to shovel, correct ways to hold your so you don't damage your back.

Well shoveling, so when you're digging someone out of an avalanche, it's almost like terraced.

Yeah.

This is something that Bruce Edgerly came up with, which is great. The strategic shoveling for one thing, if they're on a steep slope, you want to shovel in towards them, not straight down at them, because it's the fastest way to shovel out to excavate. And then also if usually it depends on what kind of setting you're in, but especially if you're at like a ski resort where a lot of people, you have more than chances are you can only have like one or two people up front

Also, if your car is snowed in, I did see some tips like using a lighter to heat your key if your lock is frozen, or putting on a pre snow car cover so you can just remove that sucker do a little less scrape. Another option is just to never go outside again. Now. Main advice lift with your legs and not your back. And if you're my dad, please wait until I can come up and help you. Please thank you, sir. Also, a lot of you had a similar question, and I'm just going to say your

Yeah, in the last ten years. You know, that's a particularly interesting period of time. There's strong evidence that from snow radars. For instance, Ben Hatchett is doing some great work, but he's at the Desert Research Institute in you and r They've got these snow radars that they can look at the snow levels and they've had a huge increase,

Forest fires occur. And that's it direct.

You know, if you have snow sitting on top of that soil for longer and it melts later there's more moisture. So we know that the dwindling snowpacks have a lot of far reaching effects.

Right, So snow hydrology work is not just about skiing and avalanches. We need data that folks like net are collecting and crunching to figure out how much water we can expect the rest of the year. Another very one, more scientific question, Gillian Leech wants to know what scientifically is the best kind of snow for snowballs.

The warm and dense kuy and okay.

Yeah, zero hesitation there.

Yes, Colorado tends to get the lightest snow sort of at least in the mountain regions in the US that need the upper Peninsula of Michigan and some of the Lake Effect areas, but not so much in this air or the Cascades or some of these maritime areas.

A dense like heavy.

Snow is what you you want because it'll pack better into a snowball as it gets closer to freezing.

It's easier to make snowballs with Do.

Snow hydrologists ever have snowball fights?

No, have them with my kids.

But you don't get being in the face by a colleague.

No, you're like, Mark, what are you doing?

Okay?

I think, yeah, I think that's just a you know, it's you sort of get used to everything right, and just get used to being around a lot of snow.

That makes sense. Two last questions. What's the worst thing about your job.

Or the worst thing is I don't I don't get outside as much as I would like to, or you know, not in the snow as much as I want to, because to be because you.

Know, scientific research science, it can be really tough.

You know, like writing and being in front of a computer is not always the easiest thing to do. I think anyone who is being honest would say that, you know, it can be very rewarding in a lot of other ways. I would like to be sort of in the snow more so to speak.

Do you get to ski a lot when you're up there in Mammoth?

I do, Yeah, I do. Yeah, I get out quite a bit. I do cross country skiing, skate skiing. I do a lot of back country skiing. Yeah, it depends on the year. This year looks like a good one so far.

What is your favorite thing about snow or about your job.

My favorite thing about my snow or my job, I mean two sort of different questions, I guess. But for me, it's that I get to work on something that I love. But I love, you know, I love being out there and the physical parts of working with snow and on the snow and the places that I've been to do that. It also intellectually is just a really interesting material, and it's like one of the brightest substances on Earth. If that exists near its smelting temperature, it is extremely weak

I wonder why does it smell? Why does snow have a smell?

A smell?

Yeah, shouldn't Okay, Yeah?

Sometimes, I mean it's like when it's really quiet, Uh, it sounds like it's quiet when it's a snow starts out to you because the snow's acting like a baffle, like a sound baffle, and so maybe the same thing's going on. And with smells, I mean they're not really so whatever, you know, if you're long under or smells terrible or whatever, it's just kind of coming back at you when it's snowing and it's not really.

That's funny though, that's pat question. Thank you so much for doing this and for meeting me essentially in a parking lot in Lax.

Yeah. Problem, it's weird.

Probably one of the weirdest part of your juts. Okay, so email a stranger, find a bench and asks more people stupid questions because they have such good stories and you'll never see snow the same. Now. Ned is not on social media, but Ologies is. It's at ologies on Instagram and Twitter. I'm Ali Ward with one L on both. There are more links up at aliward dot com slash ologies and to support via Patreon and submit ologists questions before I record and to see some behind the scenes