Interesting facts about winter and snow. Interesting facts about snow and snowflakes Scientific story about snow

Did you know that 1 septillion snow crystals fall every winter? Do you need 1 million small drops to make a snowflake? Although snow appears to be a common occurrence at first glance, it is actually a very complex form of precipitation.


Interesting snow terminology


Snow is not the same. Well, who can know this better than skiers and snowboarders? Skiers in the early 1900s came up with their own terminology to describe different types of snow. For example, bang-bang, mashed potatoes, champagne snow, cauliflower, sticky snow, dust.

The biggest snowflake in the world

According to experts, snowflakes are an accumulation of many small ice crystals. Most snowflakes are no more than 1 cm wide. The water component of snowflakes is more variable than we think. The average snowflake is made of 180 billion water molecules, but the percentage of snow water depends on various factors such as temperature, crystal structure, wind speed, etc. Although there is no image of the largest recorded snowflake, according to the Guinness Book of Records, a giant snowflake was found in Fort Key, Montana, on January 28, 1887, its width was 38 cm and its thickness was 20 cm.

Snow color

Many people think that snow is white or blue, but its colors also range from yellow and orange to green and even purple! But believe it or not, snow is actually colorless! Surprised? Here's the thing. According to the State Snow and Ice Information Center, the complex structure of snow crystals is transformed into countless tiny surfaces from which light is reflected. Cold-tolerant algae are tiny photosynthetic organisms that grow on the snow and ice of the North Pole and alpine regions. Different types of algae can color snow yellow, red, orange, brown, and green. Of course, snow takes on some color after falling to the ground. If there is a large amount of dust, impurities or sand in the air, pink, brown, orange or red snow may be seen falling. Orange snow fell in Siberia in 2007, and Krasnodar boasted pink snow in 2010.


Snowfall record

If you've ever wondered where the most snow falls in a year, here's your answer: Mount Baker, Washington, holds the world record with 2,850 cm of snowfall in 1998-99.

Snowfall record in 24 hours

The largest amount of snow fell in one day at Silver Lake, Colorado, in 1921. The snow thickness was 190 cm. Another impressive record is 157.5 cm of snow that fell in Georgetown, Colorado, on December 4, 1913. No snow is too low temperatures It can also operate at very low temperatures if there is a source of humidity. However, most snowfalls occur when temperatures are relatively warm.

The longest winter road in the world

The Vapusk Trail is built every January on ice and snow. Its length is 700.5 km. The road connects Gilliam, Manitoba, to Peawanook, Ontario. The Wapusk Trail even has a Guinness Book of World Records certification. This type of temporary route plays a big role in the transportation of goods. The road closes in March-April. Of course, goods can also be transported by air, but this is, of course, more expensive.

Blizzards and Bombs

Did you know that one snowstorm can dump over 39 million tons of snow, releasing the energy equivalent of 120 atomic bombs? The Great Blizzard of 1888 was one of the most devastating snowstorms ever to hit New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut. During the storm, 125 cm of snow fell.

Fastest half marathon barefoot in the snow

Dutch daredevil Wim Hof ​​holds the record for running barefoot on snow and ice. He completed the race in 2 hours 16 minutes 34 seconds near Oulu, Finland on January 26, 2007. Hof's amazing abilities to withstand harsh winds, snow, ice and low temperatures earned him the name Iceman. After swimming 80 meters under the ice of the North Pole, Wim Hof ​​earned another Guinness World Record.

The largest snow sculpture

On December 20, 2007, at the Garbin International Snow and Ice Sculpture Festival, a team of 600 skilled sculptors inaugurated the world's largest snow sculpture. The stunning composition, 200m long and 35m high, was inspired by the Olympic Games. This majestic landscape became the centerpiece of a festival in Heilongzhang province, one of the coldest places in China.

Snowflake Man

For a long time, snowflakes have amazed scientists and philosophers such as Rene Descartes, Johannes Kepler and Robert Hook. But the man who literally devoted his life to the study of snowflakes was Wilson A. Bentley (1865-1931). He was the first to capture snow crystals on film. Known as the Snowflake Man, Bentley took over 5,000 photographs of snowflakes. In the 19th century he received international recognition for his work in the field of microphotography. Bentley's legacy includes a large library of magazines, books, published articles, and more than 5,000 photographs of tiny wonders of beauty, as he often called snowflakes.

  1. As you know, snow does not fall all over the globe, because nature took care of the temperature conditions of some countries. This is why most of the people who inhabit our planet have never seen snow in their lives. Maybe from a photograph, or maybe you’ve visited snowy countries.
  2. Of all the snow that has fallen on the entire globe, there is not a single snowflake that has a repeating structure!
  3. Snowflakes are 95% air. That is why they fall very slowly, at a speed of 0.9 km/hour.
  4. Why is snow white? Because snow has air in its structure. In this case, all kinds of light rays are simply reflected from the boundary of ice crystals with air and scattered. But there have been cases in history when snow of a different color fell. For example, black snow fell in Switzerland in 1969, just in time for Christmas, and in 1955 green snow fell in California. The saddest thing in this story is that the residents who tasted this snow died soon, and those who took the green snow in their hands received severe itching and a rash on their hands.
    But the snow is not so white everywhere. For example, in Antarctica and high mountains, snow of pink, purple, red and yellowish-brown colors is found. This is facilitated by creatures that live in the snow and are called Chlamydomonas snow.
  5. 1 cm of snow cover, which covers our Earth during the winter, provides a full 25-35 cubic meters of water per 1 hectare of area. Perhaps people will soon come up with some devices for collecting snow and using it in the future. Somewhere in industry, or as process water for irrigating fields, flushing in public toilets, etc. and so on. Or maybe learn to separate water and chemicals in the snow.
  6. When a snowflake falls into the water, it emits a high-frequency sound that is not detected by humans, but, according to scientists, the fish population of the river really does not like it.
  7. Snow, under normal conditions, melts at a temperature of 0 degrees Celsius. However, a significant amount of snow can evaporate at sub-zero temperatures without being converted into a liquid phase. This process occurs when the sun's rays hit the snow.
  8. In the winter season, snow reflects up to 90% of the sun's rays from the Earth's surface, directing them back into space. Thus, preventing the Earth from warming up.
  9. At temperatures below -2-5 degrees Celsius, a creaking sound is heard when walking in the snow. And the colder the weather, the stronger this creaking is heard. And there are two reasons for this: firstly, the sound appears when snow crystals break, and secondly, when the crystals slide against each other under the pressure that you create.
  10. The largest snowflake in the entire world has been witnessed in history. During a snowfall in 1987 on January 28 in Fort Coy (Montana, USA), a snowflake found had a diameter of 38 cm. And this despite the fact that ordinary snowflakes have an average diameter of 5 mm.

Now you know more :)

For some of us, the winter months present an uninvited guest in the form of endless snow. We will tell you interesting facts about fluffy snow that each of us should know.

Snowflakes are minerals

As water droplets freeze, the water vapor surrounding them condenses on their surface. Because of the V-shaped angle between oxygen and two hydrogen atoms in each water molecule, the molecules attach to each other in a hexagonal shape. Therefore, snowflakes first form as hexagonal prismatic crystals, which are about the size of a dot in a sentence. Prismatic crystals can be slender columns like wooden pencils, flat like six-sided slabs of glass, or anything in between. As more water vapor attaches to them, the columns expand or become needle-like while the plates develop six branches that themselves branch off, eventually forming the familiar, fern-like snowflake shape. A typical snowflake contains 180 billion water molecules. The structure of each snowflake depends on the water available and the temperature with which it interacts. Even snowflakes next to each other form into different shapes. This is why there are virtually no two identical snowflakes. Statistically, this famous fact sounds dubious. Every winter, on average, one septillion (that's 1 followed by 24 zeros) of snowflakes falls from the sky. If we take into account all the winters in the past, it is quite logical to assume that the two snowflakes should have been identical. However, the complexity of snowflakes is so great that their variety is almost endless. And if we consider them atomically, their complexity will increase even more. About 1 in 3,000 hydrogen atoms has a neutron in its nucleus, making it heavy hydrogen. These changes in hydrogen are distributed differently in each snowflake and reduce the chances of two identical snowflakes forming to almost zero. Despite their differences, snowflakes are the same in that their molecules adopt an ordered crystal lattice structure. And because they are solid, natural, and inorganic, snow falls into an unexpected classification: minerals. That's right, snow is in the same class as diamonds, sapphires and rubies. If you don't mind keeping your hand in the freezer, then it can probably be set into a ring.

Snowflakes begin their lives as grains of sand.

Moisture is, of course, a necessary ingredient in snow. However, water is found everywhere in the atmosphere in the form of vapor and small droplets, and only some of this moisture becomes snow. The catalyst for this process is the condensation nucleus. These nuclei can be anything from certain air pollution to ash from forest fires or volcanic eruptions, or radioactive particles from nuclear explosions. They can also be sea salt, meteorite dust from space, dust from Earth, or pollen. When the atmosphere is too hot or dry, dust and water remain separated. The dust creates an atmospheric haze that can sometimes be seen hanging over large cities in the summer. Water droplets do not freeze instantly when the air temperature drops to 0 degrees Celsius and can remain supercooled down to -40 degrees Celsius. However, when the droplets come into contact with the solid surface of a dust particle, they freeze at much higher temperatures, in some cases temperatures above -6 degrees Celsius. Because each dust particle is different from the others, the droplets freeze at different temperatures.

Cereals: falling snow balls


Snowflakes are quite small and when the atmosphere is cold and dry, they remain that way. Dry snow is very annoying for those who like to play snowballs because there is not enough moisture in it for the snow to stick together into snowballs. But when the troposphere is completely or partially warm, snowflakes melt a little, resulting in a wet film forming on their outside. When another snowflake crashes into it, they stick together to form a larger snowflake. Then the snowflake grows larger and larger, colliding with other snowflakes. If only light winds are present, these snowflakes stay together on their way to the ground, reaching the size of a silver dollar or larger. The largest snowflake in the world, according to the Guinness Book of Records, fell on a ranch in Fort Keogh, Montana in January 1887. The rancher measured it and saw that its diameter was 38 centimeters, about the size of a Frisbee plate. Snowflakes can also form graupel, a distinct type of precipitation. Don't be surprised if you've never heard of them because they are often mistaken for hail or sleet. Hail is usually associated with thunderstorms rather than blizzards. In addition, its formation requires upward wind currents blowing at a speed of 100 kilometers per hour or more. A drop of precipitation freezes and an upward flow of air sends it upward, where it collides with a large amount of water, which forms another layer on it. Thus, the hail grows in size until it becomes too heavy to be carried upward by the air current. It can become as big as a golf ball. If you cut it open, you can see rings indicating layers of ice. Another name for sleet is ice pellets, rain that freezes just before it hits the ground. Krupa, on the other hand, begins its life as a snowflake. As the snowflake falls, it passes through a cloud of supercooled droplets approximately 10 millimeters in diameter. The drop sticks to the snowflake and freezes. The image above is a real dendritic snowflake. A large lumpy ball is attached to its center. These grains tend to remain small and much softer than the icy surface of the hail. They are tiny snowballs that are only suitable for a snowball fight between Jonathan Swift's Lilliputians.

Snow is not always white


Snow appears white because the complex structure of snowflakes gives it multiple surfaces to reflect light across the color spectrum. What little sunlight a snowflake absorbs is also distributed evenly. Because the visible light spectrum is white, snow appears white to us. In fact, this is why we see most white substances as white. This is due to the unusual way in which they scatter light. Without their complex structure, snowflakes are liquid water or pure ice, which is transparent rather than white. Snowflakes don't have to be white either. Blue snow is an alternative result of light scattering and absorption. Blue color is more difficult to absorb than other colors and if we look at snow from a distance, we can see blue shades among the white ones. Photosynthetic algae can also give snow a red, orange, purple, brown or green hue. The most common color is red or pink and is commonly called "watermelon snow" due to its color and sweet taste (although it is not recommended to eat). Snow is known to fall in different colors, usually due to air pollution. In 2007, orange, foul-smelling, oily snow fell in Siberia.

Deadly Snow

There are approximately 105 snow storms in the United States each year, and each storm can produce 39 million tons of snow. This is equivalent to 11,000 Empire State Buildings of snow falling on Americans every year. Is it any wonder that snow storms can cause infrastructure to stop functioning in entire cities? A 2010 study found that local economies could suffer between $300 million and $700 million in losses due to a single day of infrastructure downtime. And that doesn't even include lost tax revenue. It also does not reflect the cost of snow removal. Missouri spent $1.2 million to salt its roads during one February snowstorm in 2011. In addition, there is a cost in the form of lives. Since 1936, snowstorms have caused 200 deaths annually. Approximately 70 percent of these deaths are due to automobile accidents. Another 25 percent are the result of overexertion from shoveling snow or pushing cars. The remaining 5 percent comes from roof collapses, house fires, carbon monoxide poisoning from stranded cars, or electrocution from broken power lines. And that's not even counting blizzards, which depend not on snowfall, but on constant (three hours or more) winds blowing at a speed of at least 56 kilometers per hour. Blizzards do not occur as frequently or as deadly as other extreme weather events such as hurricanes or tornadoes, but not all hurricanes or tornadoes kill people. Unlike almost every snowstorm, which results in loss of life. In February 1972, Iran suffered a snowstorm that lasted a week. During this time, several villages were covered with an 8-meter layer of snow, because of which all the inhabitants died. The number of deaths has reached 4,000. By comparison, the deadliest tornado in history, which occurred in Bangladesh in 1989, killed 1,300 people.

Giant Snowman


Most of us can't create real snow sculptures. The best we get is three large balls stacked on top of each other with a carrot for a nose and coals for eyes. When we step back to admire our creation, we often wonder who could have done it better. And here is the answer to your question. The world's largest snow woman was Olympia, 37.2 meters high according to the Guinness Book of Records. She was named after an elderly Maine senator at the time, Olympia Snowe, and the town of Bethel spent a month sculpting the snow woman in 2008. Her eyelashes were made from skis and her eyes were made from giant wreaths. her lips were made of old tires painted red. The snow woman's hands were two 8.2-meter pine trees. To give her style, she was draped with a 30.5-meter scarf, car tires were attached in the form of buttons, and she had a 2-meter pendant hung around her neck, and while she may not like to admit it, she weighs 6 million kilograms.

Artificial snow


People have been attaching wooden planks to their feet and skiing down mountains for the last 4,000 years, but it wasn't until the 1800s that skiing was recognized as a recreational and sporting event. Another 50 years passed before the first snow-making machine was patented. In March 1949, Wayne Pierce, Art Hunt, and Dave Richey attached a soda hose to a spray paint compressor. They demonstrated how water, pushed through a spout, is sprayed onto a mist, allowing it to solidify at higher temperatures. In 1961, Alden Hanson patented a snow machine that used a fan to shoot snowflakes over long distances. In 1975, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin discovered an even better nucleating agent: a biodegradable protein that helps water form ice crystals. In other words: dirt. As with sand and natural snow, it acted as a catalyst for water to freeze in warm weather. Today, snow machines (“guns”) make snow much the same way Mother Nature does. When the 2014 Winter Olympics were held in the beach resort of Sochi, Russia, organizers had 500 snowmakers ready to make sure there would be enough snow. The average February temperature in Sochi is 4.4 degrees Celsius. Therefore, just in case, the Olympic Committee stocked up on 710,000 cubic meters of snow taken from the Caucasus Mountains last winter. In preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Chinese scientists said they had caused the first artificial snowfall over the Tibetan Plateau. In 2007, they shot cigarette-sized sticks of silver iodide into the clouds, causing 1 centimeter of snow to fall. The molecular lattice of silvered iodine is similar to and binds to water, acting like sand to natural snow and freezing the water. China used it again in 2009, hoping to ease the drought around Beijing. It's unclear whether cloud seeding works, mainly because it's hard to prove whether snow was going to come from an incoming cloud anyway. Of course, sometimes people really need it to snow indoors. This requires artificial snow. One of the easiest ways to create it is to add cold water to sodium polyacrylate. This results in the formation of crystals that look and feel like real snow. Well, where can you find sodium polyacrylate? In disposable diapers. You didn't disobey: every time a baby pees in a diaper, it also makes warm, yellow snow.

It also snows on two planets that are our neighbors in the solar system


Mars experiences wild temperature fluctuations. If you were standing on the Martian equator, you might slip out of your shoes, but you'd still need a hat. The reason is that the temperature at your feet will be 21 degrees Celsius and at chest level 0 degrees Celsius. That's why you would be able to see the snow on your shoulders, which would disappear before it hit your fingers. In 2008, Mars Lander observed Martian snowfall that evaporated before the snow fell to the ground. However, Martian snow actually reaches the surface, especially around the poles. The photo above shows the North Pole of Mars. This snow is not water. This is frozen carbon dioxide. The crystals are microscopic, probably the size of red blood cells. They fall out like mist. The dry and powdery particles don't stick together into a snowball, but that would be a skier's dream. In rare cases, water-ice still falls on Mars. Snow also falls on Venus and is much stranger than Martian snow. It does not consist of water or carbon dioxide. Venusian snow is made of metal. Venus's lowlands are strewn with pyrite minerals. Along with extreme atmospheric pressure and temperatures of up to 480 degrees Celsius, minerals evaporate and rise into an atmosphere of carbon dioxide. At the higher, colder altitudes atop the great Venusian mountains, a metallic fog shrouds the slopes with bismuth sulfide and lead sulfide, better known as bismuthin and galena. Science doesn't know whether real snow falls on Venus, but rain has been spotted on its surface. Again, rain on Venus is very different from rain on Earth. It consists of sulfuric acid.

The world's largest snowball fights

Currently, the largest snowball fight in the world is held by the residents of Seattle. Anyone who has lived in the Emerald City knows that in this city it rains much more often than it snows. So when Seattle wanted to sponsor a fundraiser that ended with a legendary snowball fight, they had to bring 34 truckloads (or 74,000 kilograms) of snow from the Cascade Mountains to downtown Seattle, right next to the Space Needle. Six thousand tickets for the fight were sold online and each ticket holder received a bracelet. On the designated Snow Day, January 12, 2013, 5,834 ticket holders had their wristbands scanned before entering the arena. The arena was roughly divided in half with several snow forts scattered around the perimeter. Some participants brought equipment for making snowballs. The previous record was held by 5,387 South Koreans who threw more snowballs into the air than at each other. This couldn't happen in Seattle. At 5:30 pm, 130 judges from the Guinness Book of Records surrounded the square and gave the signal for battle. They disqualified those who did not throw a snowball within the next 90 seconds. The video shows huge curtains of flying snowballs. Some participants received scars. At the end of the allotted time, Seattle set a new record. By the end of the day, $50,000 had been raised for the Boys and Girls Club. The unofficial record for the largest snowball fight belongs to long-dead men. During the Civil War, the two Confederate blocs attacked each other with nothing more than snowballs. Two snowstorms on February 19 and 21, 1863, dropped 43 centimeters of snow on Fredericksburg, Virginia, where General Thomas's II Corps was camped for the winter. General Robert Hoke's brigade had a friendly rivalry with Colonel William Stiles' 16th. On the morning of February 25, Hawk's five North Carolina regiments attacked Stiles' camp. The Georgians, who mostly comprised Stiles's regiment, fought off the attack and marched on Hawk's camp. Robert Hawk's soldiers were waiting with their sacks filled with snowballs. The melee that followed included approximately 10,000 participants.

The coolest annual snow festival

If you love snow, then there is a place on Earth where you should go. It's so stunning that it can put winter to shame. Every January, nearly 30 million visitors travel to Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang Province in northeast China, to attend the International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival. The average temperature in Harbin is -17 degrees Celsius, and the recorded record temperature is -35 degrees Celsius. Thanks to this, there are all conditions for snow and ice sculptors to create their own designs. The festival began in 1963 as an ice lantern garden party. It was delayed for decades due to China's Cultural Revolution, but was revived as an annual event in 1985. The festival is sponsored entirely by the Chinese government and lasts about a month, ending with a day dedicated to destroying the sculptures with ice picks. Ice lanterns are hollowed-out sculptures with a candle inside and are still part of the celebrations, but the crowd wants to see life-size ice buildings and structures. In December 2007, 600 sculptors took part in the construction of the world's largest snow sculpture to open the 2008 festival. The sculpture, called “Romantic Feelings,” reached a height of 35 meters and its length was 200 meters. It included an ice maiden, a cathedral and a Russian-style temple.
  1. As you know, snow does not fall all over the globe, because nature took care of the temperature conditions of some countries. This is why most of the people who inhabit our planet have never seen snow in their lives. Maybe from a photograph, or maybe you’ve visited snowy countries.
  1. Of all the snow that has fallen on the entire globe, there is not a single snowflake that has a repeating structure!
  2. Snowflakes are 95% air. That is why they fall very slowly, at a speed of 0.9 km/hour.
  3. Why is snow white? Because snow has air in its structure. In this case, all kinds of light rays are simply reflected from the boundary of ice crystals with air and scattered. But there have been cases in history when snow of a different color fell. For example, black snow fell in Switzerland in 1969, just in time for Christmas, and in 1955 green snow fell in California. The saddest thing in this story is that the residents who tasted this snow died soon, and those who took the green snow in their hands received severe itching and a rash on their hands.
    But the snow is not so white everywhere. For example, in Antarctica and high mountains, snow of pink, purple, red and yellowish-brown colors is found. This is facilitated by creatures that live in the snow and are called Chlamydomonas snow.
  4. 1 cm of snow cover, which covers our Earth during the winter, provides a full 25-35 cubic meters of water per 1 hectare of area. Perhaps people will soon come up with some devices for collecting snow and using it in the future. Somewhere in industry, or as process water for irrigating fields, flushing in public toilets, etc. and so on. Or maybe learn to separate water and chemicals in the snow.
  5. When a snowflake falls into the water, it emits a high-frequency sound that is not detected by humans, but, according to scientists, the fish population of the river really does not like it.
  6. Snow, under normal conditions, melts at a temperature of 0 degrees Celsius. However, a significant amount of snow can evaporate at sub-zero temperatures without being converted into a liquid phase. This process occurs when the sun's rays hit the snow.
  7. In the winter season, snow reflects up to 90% of the sun's rays from the Earth's surface, directing them back into space. Thus, preventing the Earth from warming up.
  8. At temperatures below -2-5 degrees Celsius, a creaking sound is heard when walking in the snow. And the colder the weather, the stronger this creaking is heard. And there are two reasons for this: firstly, the sound appears when snow crystals break, and secondly, when the crystals slide against each other under the pressure that you create.
  9. The largest snowflake in the entire world has been witnessed in history. During a snowfall in 1987 on January 28 in Fort Coy (Montana, USA), a snowflake found had a diameter of 38 cm. And this despite the fact that ordinary snowflakes have an average diameter of 5 mm.

In fact, it is colorless, and the white color is just an optical illusion. Snowflakes are complex-shaped ice crystals with many faces in which light is refracted and re-reflected many times. If an object reflects the entire spectrum of light falling on it, we perceive it as white. And if you make a dent in a snowdrift on a sunny day, the snow appears green-yellow. When it’s cloudy, it looks blue, and when there’s a bright red sunset in the sky, it looks pink.

2. Identical snowflakes exist

Express information on the country

The Earth is in third place in terms of distance from the Sun and in fifth place among all the planets in the Solar System in size.

Age– 4.54 billion years

Average radius – 6,378.2 km

Average circumference – 40,030.2 km

Square– 510,072 million km² (29.1% land and 70.9% water)

Number of continents– 6: Eurasia, Africa, North America, South America, Australia and Antarctica

Number of oceans– 4: Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic

Population– 7.3 billion people. (50.4% men and 49.6% women)

Most populous states: Monaco (18,678 people/km2), Singapore (7607 people/km2) and Vatican City (1914 people/km2)

Number of countries: total 252, independent 195

Number of languages ​​in the world– about 6,000

Number of official languages– 95; the most common: English (56 countries), French (29 countries) and Arabic (24 countries)

Number of nationalities– about 2,000

Climate zones: equatorial, tropical, temperate and arctic (main) + subequatorial, subtropical and subarctic (transitional)

There is a myth that no two snowflakes are alike. But physicist Kenneth G. Libbrecht from the California Institute of Technology proved the opposite. He conducted an experiment and found that under conditions of the same temperature and humidity, “identical twins” of snowflakes are formed. In nature, their difference is due to movement: as they fall to the ground, the symmetry and outlines of their rays change.

3. Snowflakes can be gigantic

The average snowflake has a diameter of 5 mm and weighs about 0.004 g. However, under favorable conditions, snow crystals can adhere to each other into relatively stable structures and form snow flakes. The largest snowflake was 38 cm in diameter. It formed in the city of Fort Keough, Montana, in 1887.

4. Japan has a snowflake museum

It was discovered on the island of Hokkaido by scientist Nakaya Ukichiro. The halls of this unique museum were located in snow caves. In addition to the exhibition halls, where you can look at macro photographs of snowflakes and learn interesting facts about snow, the museum has a concert hall where famous artists regularly perform.

5. There are 180 words for snow

It was previously believed that the Eskimo language had the most words for snow and ice. But now linguists have given the palm to the Sami living in the north of Scandinavia: their language has at least 180 words for these concepts.



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