The race to uncover snow’s many mysteries earlier than it disappears endlessly

Snö: A History Sverker Sörlin Doubleday (2025)

As a baby rising up in northern Sweden, environmental historian Sverker Sörlin fell in love with snow. “I see the light outside, before I even open the slatted blinds. Snow! The miracle of whiteness is shining through the slats,” he remembers in his newest e-book, Snö.

Now, he fights for snow’s survival. And survive it should, Sörlin argues, if we’re to keep away from droughts, sinking tundra fields and an overheated planet. With wonderful anecdotes, emotive reminiscences and pleas for local weather motion, Snö goals to impress readers.

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A snowboarding journey to Norway’s Rondane Mountains marked a transcendent second for Sörlin. After sunset, dozens of puddles began freezing over within the grass round his campsite, every making a definite cracking sound. Sörlin felt at one with “the forces of nature, the whole solar system, at play in a condensed timescale”.

Snow’s distinctive soundscapes captivate. For occasion, when microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier arrived in japanese Sweden to check the CRISPR gene-editing expertise for which she received the 2020 chemistry Nobel prize, she heard the snow crunching below her ft whisper “crispr, crispr”.

And opposite to the parable, our voices are nowhere close to loud sufficient to set off an avalanche. With a stress of 20 pascals, even the sound of a jet aeroplane taking off wouldn’t set off a snowslide, and a human shriek hits simply one-tenth of that. By distinction, a sonic growth creates 200 pascals, which actually might shift some snow. Despite this proof, Sörlin nonetheless wonders, “If I stood there on the loose snow again … would I really dare to scream?”

A flurry of analysis

Sörlin celebrates individuals who have sought solutions to snow’s scientific mysteries.

In northern Japan within the Nineteen Thirties, physicist Ukichiro Nakaya undertook fieldwork within the Hokkaido Mountains, that are infamous for his or her immense snowstorms. In perishing circumstances, Nakaya grew obsessive about explaining the number of snow crystals. By creating particular person snowflakes on rabbit hairs in a low-temperature laboratory, Nakaya might assess the impacts of temperature and humidity on the crystals’ form. Each of those ‘letters from heaven’ held essential knowledge concerning the atmospheric circumstances through which they shaped.

Other snow-obsessed characters embody Willi Dansgaard, a “brusque young physicist with wide-ranging interests and an unquenchable curiosity”, who labored, beginning within the Nineteen Sixties, with ice cores drilled from Greenland’s ice sheet. In the ice cores, Dansgaard’s crew discovered snow courting again millennia, retaining what Sörlin calls “atmospheric labelling … a kind of microscopic message in a bottle”.

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Greenland’s ice-core chemistry revealed sudden local weather modifications, tying in with Dansgaard’s curiosity as to why Norse communities left the island within the Middle Ages. Studies counsel {that a} drying local weather was accountable for Norse folks’s disappearance within the fifteenth century, as a result of much less grass was obtainable for livestock in winter (B. Zhao et al. Sci. Adv. 8, eabm4346; 2022).