A curious phenomenon swept through social media recently, sparked by a video from Memphis city council member Yolanda Cooper Sutton. She held a flame to a snowball, and it…didn’t melt. Instead, it smoldered, releasing a strange odor. The footage ignited a flurry of speculation: was the snow falling across the US actually *real*?
Fellow council member Pearl Eva Walker chimed in with a simple, unsettling assertion: “man made.” Similar videos began circulating, fueling a growing sense of disbelief. The question wasn’t just about the science of snow, but about trust – what is truly falling from the sky?
The answer, surprisingly, isn’t a conspiracy. Snow *is* real. But the videos aren’t fabricated, nor are they the result of deliberate deception. They demonstrate a fascinating, and often misunderstood, property of frozen water. The seemingly impossible behavior of a burning snowball isn’t magic; it’s physics.
Snow isn’t simply frozen water. It’s roughly 90-95% air. This airy structure means there’s significantly less water present than most people assume. But the key process at play is called sublimation – a remarkable transformation where a solid turns directly into a gas, bypassing the liquid phase entirely. When a flame touches snow, much of it doesn’t melt into water; it vanishes into vapor.
Consider the structure of a snowball. It’s porous, filled with tiny air pockets. As heat is applied, any melting water is drawn inward through capillary action, filling those spaces. This explains why snow can seem to disappear without a temperature increase, and why a torch applied to snow on the ground reveals a transition from powdery to wet.
What about the black scorch marks? These aren’t evidence of burning snow. They’re the result of carbon soot produced by the flame itself – from the butane in a lighter or the fuel in a match. The soot condenses on the cold snow surface, creating the illusion of scorching. The reported smell of burning plastic? That’s likely the odor of incompletely combusted butane, or the mercaptans added to it for safety, not the snow itself.
You can replicate this experiment yourself. Pack a tight snowball, apply a flame, and observe the minimal melting and the “disappearing” snow. Notice how the water that *does* melt is pulled towards the snowball’s center. Hold snow in your hand, and you’ll quickly confirm it melts into water – a simple demonstration that dispels the illusion.
Could someone *create* fake snow? Yes, on a small scale. Ski resorts use snow-making machines, and even home versions are available. But the idea of artificially snowing an entire city or state is a logistical impossibility. It would require billions of gallons of water, thousands of noisy machines, and an operation so massive it couldn’t be concealed.
Cloud seeding, another proposed method, involves dispersing silver iodide to encourage snowfall. However, its effectiveness remains unproven and is incredibly expensive. The truth is, while humanity can influence weather patterns over time, we cannot control the weather on demand.
The snow falling from the sky is, and always has been, a natural wonder – a beautiful, complex phenomenon of frozen water crystals. The burning snowball isn’t a sign of deception, but a captivating lesson in the surprising science of sublimation and the power of observation.
