Although every Olympic winter sport relies on the slippery nature of snow and ice, exactly why those substances are so slippery has been an enduring mystery. Michael Faraday hypothesized in the nineteenth century that Keep reading
Tag: snow
Snowflake Still-Life
To take these high-resolution images of individual snowflakes, Nathan Myhrvold and his collaborators built a special camera. Their apparatus keeps the snowflakes chilled despite the strong illumination cast on them. Keep reading
Snowflake Velocimetry
In our era of remote learning, students don’t always have a chance to do hands-on lab experiments in the usual fashion. But that doesn’t mean they can’t explore important flow Keep reading
Inside Avalanches
Avalanches have traditionally been difficult to model and predict because of their complex nature. In the case of a slab avalanche, the sort often triggered by a lone skier or Keep reading
Icy Penitentes
At high, dry altitudes, fields of snow transform into rows of narrow, blade-like formations as tall as 2 meters. Known as penitentes – due to their similarity to kneeling worshipers Keep reading
Snowmelt
Much of the rain that falls on Earth began as snow high in the atmosphere. As it falls through warmer layers of air, the snowflakes melt and form water droplets. Keep reading
PyeongChang 2018: Snow-Making
These days artificial snow-making is a standard practice for ski resorts, allowing them to jump-start the early part of the season. Snow guns continuously spray a mixture of cold water Keep reading
PyeongChang 2018: Moguls
Moguls are bump-like snow mounds featured in freestyle skiing competitions and also frequently found on recreational ski courses. Although competition runs are man-made, most mogul fields form naturally on their Keep reading
Growing Snowflakes
Watching a snowflake grow seems almost magical–the six-sided shape, the symmetry, the way every arm of it grows simultaneously. But it’s science that guides the snowflake, not magic. Snowflakes are Keep reading
Visualizing Flow with Snowfall
One of the challenges in engineering and operating wind turbines is that full-scale turbines rarely behave as predicted in smaller-scale laboratory experiments and simulations. One way to reconcile these differences Keep reading