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