Short Stuff: Red Snow

and Alarming science behind red Snow. Yes, because snow is not supposed to be red. And when the snow turns red, you know things have gotten biblical. I thought you were about to say, like a rhyming. I could have. I chose not to. Specifically, when the snow turns red. That means you're not gonna enjoy the future. It's kind of what that means. I thought it was great. Mark A. Mancini went to the trouble of saying like, Okay, snow's normally white, and here's why. And I feel like we

should honor his work by mentioning it to you. Let's hear it. Why is it white? Oh? Because the crystals that make up ice or snow scatter all colors on the visible wavelength, so everything's reflected back as just white. Because they all mixed together, no color gets absorbed, and so the snow doesn't seem like blue or red normally. It can turn red, and it's actually we've known it turns red once in a while for a very long time.

This is news to me, but apparently as far back as Pliny the Elder again, yeah, I love that guy. He was writing from twenty three to seventy nine CE, and he wrote about red tennant snow as well. Yeah, I mean Pliny the Elder wrote about red snow. I think in the in the Middle Ages there were people talking about red snow. There's a guy named Randall Servenni, who it looks like Mark might have actually interviewed for

this article. In this Randall wrote a book as a professor at Arizona State University called Freaks of the Storm, which is about kind of wacky weather, and there was a chapter on red snow and he said, you know, Charles Darwin saw red snow and the Andes Mountains. It was white and when it turned red as it thawed and so a lot of like very famous people in history have been kind of freaked out by seeing this phenomenon.

I don't know at what point we figured this out, but apparently by the time Darwin was around in the mid nineteenth century and seeing red snow in the Andes, he knew what it was. So it like at least by the mid nineteenth century, we knew that red snow, it turns out, is actually caused by green algae of all things. Yeah, and that's you know, we'll get in

after the jump to exactly what's going on there. It can also you can get like reddish pinkish hues if like Saharan dust blows like into Europe or something like that. That's not the kind of red snow we're talking about. We're talking about and if you see pictures of like legit red snow and as it melts, red water flows and waterfalls all over the world, And like you said, it's green algae specifically, clama dominus nivalis very nice. I practiced it too. I think you nailed it. Let's hear

your version, clamidinous nivalis. It sounds like we both just cast a magic spell. Either way, though, I'd love Latin for that reason. All right, well, let's take an early break since that's a pseudo cliffhanger. Maybe that's what we just conjured was a break, and we'll tell you all about how green algae can turn white snow red right after this. Okay, So Clomidamnus clemidamnus, Yeah, novalis is a type of green algae, like we said, but we've been

talking about red snow and the reason. Um well, let me tell you a little bit more about this green algae. First, let's hear you get into why it's I've seen it written about as a cryophilic microu carryote, meaning it loves the cold, and it's a very tiny u carryote. It's like La Nina means the Nina, right, it's from Kingdom Plante. It's a plant, but it's also mobile. It's very very bizarre in no small part because again it's green, but and it's a plant, but it lives in high altitude

snowfields like the Arctic or in the Andes Mountains. And it's green, but it produces a red pigment called asta zanthon during warm seasons. And here's the crux of everything. If green algae didn't produce asta zanthon, we probably would not be talking about it right now. Yeah, that's a good point. The stuff is pretty interesting. There's a biologist named Arwin Edwards who I think was also interviewed for this article, who says that this red pigment xts kind

of like a sunscreen. Yea. It helps protect the organisms from excessive solar radiation during the warm seasons. And so what happens is during the wintertime, these organisms go dormant spring springs, and then they come to the surface and bloom. But you know, it can't just bloom as in snow like algae needs like liquid water to bloom. So as the snow melts, it becomes more of that sort of wet snow, and that's when the algae release starts blooming.

In the wet snow, those algile cells get going and they photosynthesize, and this is where that red pigment comes about. Yeah, and so if you get a bunch of these things together, and a lot of them can get together a single millimeter of snow, I guess a cubic melimeter can contain half a million of these individuals. There's a lot of them, and when you put a lot of them together, the snow turns red and not just like, oh, it looks kind of reddish. Especially when it melts, it is like

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

White snow reflects everything, right, so white snow can stay colder longer. If you've ever seen a snow pile that got put in the corner of a parking lot in the Midwest or north and is still there in like May, that's because that that snow is reflecting back although that solar radiation or a lot of it. If that was red, it'd be melted by February, that's the saying. And this stuff is red, so the more it blooms, the more it absorbs heat, the more it warms the surrounding snow,

the more the snow melts. Yeah, I mean that that white car that you have is going to be less hot than your red car and certainly your black car. That's why you see so many white cars in hot places where hot climate, like out in the desert. And it's the same deal here. So as the stuff turns round, like you said, it sort of becomes a cycle, a feedback loop where it starts melting more and more stuff, and then that in turn, you know, can spread the algae and all of a sudden you might have a

legit problem on your hands. And Nature magazine thinks that's the case. In twenty sixteen, they published a report under the leadership of Stephanie Let's believe from the University of Leeds, and they're basically saying, hey, there's about a five to fifteen percent acceleration of glacier melting rates because of this algae on the surface, because it's darker. Yeah, and we should say this is not so new freak of nature,

like this has always been going on. The reason that it's alarming, according to that twenty sixteen paper from Nature is that, like you just said, they're accelerating snow melt, and because global temperatures are warming and Arctic snowmelt is really important to climate change in general, they're saying, like, we need to take this into effect when we start making our climate models for glacial melting. And no one has until or no one did until twenty sixteen. But

their paper was so essentially irrefutable. They did exactly what they set out to do. Now people start to include red snow blooms into climate models. Yeah, I mean it's kind of that simple. It's speeding things up, and they're including it in those models because it's that that feedback loop is happening, and you can't just you have to include all the variables. And this is officially counts as

a variable. Yes, So yeah, you couldn't make a prediction of like what kind of glacial melt you're going to see as the temperature warms without taking that into account. It might they might melt way faster, fifteen percent faster than you would account for, and your sea wall wouldn't be built in time. So ts for you. You should have taken red snow into account. That's right. One find

a little button on this thanks to mister Mancini. We now have learned that apparently this algae smells like watermelon. I think who they interviewed said that they didn't smell it themselves, but there are people that have reported this red pigment off gas is a water melanie like smell. Yes, but Mark Mancini warns, don't eat it. Yeah, apparently the people have eaten it and have blamed red snow for gastric problems, and that's just not correct. It's probably something

else in the snow. But don't eat it anyway. Yeah, don't eat the yellow snow. That's what Frank Zappa said. Ye, and don't eat the red snow because we told you by way of our friends at holstuffworks dot com. That's the Chuck Bryant corollary. That's right. Uh, well, Chuck said, that's right. Everybody that means short stuff is out. Stuff

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