Pink Snow, Black Snow, Space Snow, Weird Snow

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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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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.

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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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

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.

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,

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. 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. 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 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 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

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 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. 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. 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.

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. 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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, 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

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 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, 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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 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

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? 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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. For more on this and pathans of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. The four start fo