Oh, the weather outside is, well, weather. The temperatures are dropping and we don’t know about you, but we could go for a snow day. Whether you prefer to spend snow days frolicking in the thick of it or you’re more of a curl up on the couch with a blanket and good book kind of person, we put together some of the COOLEST facts we know about snow. Sorry, we had to. Let’s get started!
Monkeys LOVE Snow
We aren’t the only mammals roaming the Earth that love a good snowball fight, Japanese macaques, otherwise known as snow monkeys, have been spotted making snowballs and throwing them at each other. Even the young ones get in on the action by stealing the snowballs of their friends and chasing each other down to retrieve them. Consider our hearts warmed.
There is More to Snow Than a Flake
What we mean is snow crystals can take on a number of forms. There’s the hoarfrost, or deposits of frozen water vapor that create clear furry-looking extra-large frost, there’s graupel, which consists of snowflakes that have become rounded pellets as large as 5 millimeters often mistaken for hail, and there are polycrystals, which are snowflakes made up of numerous individual ice crystals. Polycrystals are our personal favorites because those are the huge ones that when you see them you say, “look at those big snowflakes!”
Come In and Cozy Up
Have you ever looked at an igloo and wondered what the big deal was because how could a house of snow possibly be warm? Well, because they’re warmed completely by body heat and snow is 90 – 95% trapped air, the inside of an igloo actually gets about 100 degrees warmer than the outside air. This is why animals dig holes deep in the snow to hibernate for the winter.
Heavenly Peace
If you’ve ever stepped outside while it’s snowing then you probably noticed the deafening silence as the snow fell. This happens because freshly fallen snow absorbs sound waves giving everything a hush. But when snow melts, then refreezes the ice can reflect sound waves making sound travel further and clearer.
Illegal in Some States
Well, kind of. Syracuse, New York is one of the snowiest towns in the United States, and while the people that live there expect it, they don’t always love it. So in 1992, the city’s Common Council passed a decree that outlawed snow before Christmas Eve. Mother Nature did not comply, but hey, it was worth a shot.