“We Did Not Know Then What Surprises Awaited Us”

Many years ago, T.C. Poulter revealed some loud surprises from Antarctica, in the study “Arctic and Antarctic Acoustics,” T.C. Poulter, Stanford Research Institute Biological Sonar Lab, 1966. Poulter reports: …first observed in the Antarctic in 1934 during the construction of a tunnel through the very porous, coarsely crystalline snow for communication during the winter night […]

Thesis: “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” in Stockholm

A tidy stream of scholarship emerges from this 2017 thesis: “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow: Urin i konsten: om tolkning som händelse,” Jens Martin Svendsen, thesis, Faculty of Social Sciences, Stockholm Business School, Marketing, Stockholm University, 2017. The author writes: “Don’t eat the yellow snow—Urine in art: events of interpretationUrine seams to evoke feelings. Through […]

Where and When Snow Comes Off a Moving Train

The snowfall from a snow-laden (from a snowfall) train is somewhat predictable—and so can be somewhat controlled, suggests this study: “Studies of Snow-Dropping from a Train on a Turnout due to Dynamic Excitations,” Tiia-Riikka Loponen, Pekka Salmenperä, Heikki Luomala, and Antti Nurmikolu, Journal of Cold Regions Engineering, vol. 32, no. 2, June 2018. The authors, […]

The Visual Aesthetics of Snowflakes (new study)

Given a selection of snowflakes – some with simple structures and others more complex – which do people prefer? To find out, Olivia C. Adkins, who is a Graduate Research Assistant at Western Kentucky University, US, and J. Farley Norman, University Distinguished Professor, also at Western Kentucky University, devised at set of experiments. They showed […]

Catastrophic Snow Globes – who’s shaking who?

At first glance, snow globes might seem trite or trivial objects, however : “[…] on closer reflection, they are revealed to be symbolic realms that provide clues to the desires, dreams, nightmares, and memories of the cultures that produce them.” – explains professor Lindsey Freeman, a sociologist who teaches, writes, and thinks about cities, memory, […]

Falling Snowflakes: vertical or horizontal?

In 2009, researchers at the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, of the University of North Dakota, US,  presented (in association with the Instrumentation Sciences Branch, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) details of their Snowflake Video Imager (SVI). It was fully described in a paper for the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology. The imager, which linked […]

Autopsy of a snowman & Dr. Butt’s patterns of deaths

Video of an autopsy of a snowman (via onetruemedia, HT Jennifer Ouellette): BUTT: For general background to this phenomenon, we recommend Dr Butt’s study: “Patterns of death among avalanche fatalities: a 21-year review,” Jeff Boyd, MBBS, Pascal Haegeli, PhD, Riyad B. Abu-Laban, MD MHSc, Michael Shuster, MD, John C. Butt, MD CM, Canadian Medical Association Journal, 2009 […]