Stephanie Poff
Winter officially arrived yesterday, but we can safely say that it’s felt like winter in Canada for a while now. For this month’s chilly Take Five, we’re featuring five nifty facts about snow, thanks to Environment Canada’s senior climatologist David Phillips. Bundle up!
Snowflakes Galore
As you shovel walkways and see plows clearing the streets of their white blankets of snow, try to imagine that one septillion snowflakes cover our country each year! That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 snowflakes. Oooosh!
Work It Out
It takes as much effort to walk two kilometres on bare ground as it does to walk half that distance through 15 centimetres of snow!
Snack Attack
For some inexplicable reason, little ones are always tempted to chow down on snow. But yellow snow isn’t the only kind you should watch out for. Even the whitest of snow can be impure - tiny wingless insects have been known to live in snow drifts; they get in through soil or animal excrement and thrive there. Blech.
A Winter Voyage
It takes roughly 30 minutes for a snowflake to reach the ground from a height of three kilometres. Think about it. It takes a person a few minutes to skydive from the same height. What a journey!
Colder Is Crunchier
As the temperature outside drops, the crunch heard when walking on snow gets louder. At –15°C snow underfoot squeaks, but below –18°C it tends to make a hollow sound.