In Praise of Snow

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1995/01/in-praise-of-snow/305654/

In the language of the Irish, scholars say, there are a dozen words for "peat." In the language of the Arabs, we've been told, there are many words for "sand." I, for my part, grew up speaking a language in which there are perhaps a hundred terms for snow, and I am not a native of Igloolik.

I learned some of those terms from a man named Mark Williams, a former ski-lodge operator who is a geographer at the University of Colorado and a specialist in the properties of snow. "If you're talking about snow crystals in the atmosphere," he told me recently, "well, then, there are scores of terms. There are needles and sheaths and columns. There are pyramids. Cups. Bullets. Plates. Scrolls. Branches. Dendritic crystals. Stellar crystals." And those are just some of the basic forms. Snow crystals also come in combinations. Stellar crystals with plates. Dendritic crystals with branches. Hollow bullets. Bullets with dendrites. Plates with scrolls. Plates with spatial dendrites. Rimed particles. Rimed needle crystals. Lump graupels.

Graupel-like snow with nonrimed extensions. Some of the names of snow crystals (branches, needles, bullets) are appropriately suggestive: in high wind, snow crystals can be as abrasive as sand.

After snow has fallen, the name for it picks up additional qualifiers as it begins to settle or drift, as heat and cold and wind and moisture and the snow's own weight begin to make their influence felt. Freshly fallen snow starts out as what Williams calls an "ice skeleton"—a loose scaffolding of crystals amid an enormous volume of air. To give his students an idea of the ratio of snow to air in a fresh snowfall, Williams has them compress a family-sized loaf of Wonder Bread to its smallest possible size. (It can be reduced to a two-inch cube.)