The Color of Snow: CR4 Challenge (01/12/10)

Yellow. Huskies.

Watch out where the huskies go....... But perhaps you could be Movin to Montana soon.....

A Classic!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws5Xeu3BEQk

Enjoy!

Joe

'

In case you didn't get the reference Gil the above one character is an apostrophe.

Apostrophe is the name of the Frank Zappa album that has the lyrics being recited by others.

Hi Stevem,

Sorry for the misunderstanding of (') but I never heard Zappa's songs or never noticed just when he became a promoter of freedom of speech and was against censorship. As musician, I was and still a fan of Django Reinhardt and Les Paul.

Thanks for the words and believe me I went to "wikipedia" and learn lots about all three. This is your collaboration, not to the subject, to my personal improvement.

Next time as your comment, write the same number of letters and characters and you will be fine, Gil.

going to be a dental floss tycoon?

Seein as its now 35degC outside at present (that's 95degF for some of you guys) here in Oz, I CAN'T ANSWER THIS QUESTION!!!

Where's all the snow gone???

I must be in a parallel universe?

Or is it just too hot in summer for snow... actually here where I live it's even too hot in winter for snow! Oh well someone has to live here :)

The lowest temperature here is about 15ºC. No way the experiment can be performed.

If in the open the hole will be the colour of the sky at that moment. If under a tree with genn leaves, green. If under autumn colour leaves, the colour of the leavrs - yellow orange.

i am agree your opinions

Happy New Year OTNToys,

Don't experiment, just read what other write down and learn about snow and its colourations. This is a fantastic world! We communicate and we learn something every day or so, isn't it? Stay with us and you will get cold being in Toronto. No! I just joke. It's cold here, around -10*C every day for two weeks but we survive like you with 35*C. This is summer for us but imagine when we get our summer with 35*C, Gil.

It is especially noticable if there is a crack or crevice where the light reflects multiple times. Why shouldn't it be blue, water is blue as is obvious if you fill a white bottomed swimming pool.

Sounds good to me, but I'm just a humble Engineer.

What I want to know is if snow is frozen water, why is it white when it falls out of the sky? and not clear.

Perhaps "off target", but I was amazed to hear from "a humble engineer". I didn't know such a thing existed.... Sorry, I couldn't resist.

I read once (waiting to recall where) that snow is white because it has sulfur in it. I am skeptical of this but it should be verifiable. anyone?

Happy New Year Merlin,

Go to www.wikipedia.org and you get the information about "snow". All the best, Gil.

It's me again Merlin,

Also, check one of my comments concerning the whiteness of snow. By, Gil.

Happy New Year GHO Goat,

Yes, compressed cristals of water without air is blue. Air between cristals whitening the colour of the snow. Imagine, density of snow could be 13 times ligther than water. Imaginw the air in between the cristals! Also, direct light is whiter than indirect light. We experience this phenomenon every year in Canada.

The question was posed by someone working at "wikipedia"? Why, because they don't have one single word about the colour of snow. Wait for scientific explanations, Gil.

When the snow falls (this is the same guest) - almost all the light is reflected / scatterred off- and that's why what you see is the white light, there is no preferencial treatment here .

It is like if you grind coloured glass fine, it will be white.

When you go deep, as is mentioned in a previous post, which portion I didn' elaborate, is the ice compresses into solid chunks. Still no problem, since the light passes and reflects back from the end with negligible portion of the red end of spectrum absorbed.

However if the size of the chunk (call it depth) is large enough, you do see the effect since in forward path and the reverse way, it loses significant amount of the red and the longer wavelengths.

Just as a proof _{had to search out with "blue ice" googled.}

So is it just coincidence that (referring to the photo in the link you posted) the blue starts right at the line where the crevasse casts a shadow? Or is there something about sunlight that creates air bubbles in ice?

I contend that if I climbed down into the snow hole I dug in the Original Post, and turned on a bright white light, the snow would look white, not blue. (But I'm just wingin it here, I've never actually tried this.)

I agree that thick glass tends to look green, and for the same reason it makes sense that thick homogeneous ice would look blue, but a hole dug in the snow is not solid ice devoid of air bubbles -- it's snow.

Forcing me to check web for something i know ?

Wiki ,here ,

here : and their ice turns blue because all its air bubbles are squeezed out.

It is a common misconception that the blue color exhibited by glaciers, old sea ice, or even holes poked into a snow bank is due to the same phenomenon that makes the sky blue--light scattering _{(Rayleigh scattering) ...}

When light passes through ice, however, the red light is absorbed while the blue is transmitted. Were the operating process scattering as in the atmosphere, then the transmitted light would be red, not blue. However, because of the large size of snow grains and ice crystals, all wavelengths of visible light are scattered equally. Scattering therefore does not play an appreciable role in determining the color of the transmitted light.

It takes an appreciable thickness of pure ice to absorb enough red light so that only the blue is transmitted.

Some of what you say maybe true. The snow is blue though the H²O molecule passes most colors of the spectrum it reflects some of the blue. It takes 25 meters for water to reflect all the blue out. That is why the earth's water bodies appear blue. Snow appearance of being white is do to the shape of the crystal and how it scatters the light. Most of the color spectrum is reflected back so that it appears white. Even the white of the snow has a soft blue tint to it as more of blue spectrum is reflected near the surface then the others. Some of the light passes into the snow what you see is the blue being reflected by the H²O in its solid state.

Happy New Year Ozzb,

Thanks! Finally, we start to get some explanations about why the sea appears blue from the sky or why the glaciers' ice is blue? It's good to have some knowledgeable input. The white colour of the snow is the air between cristals.

In the industry is work for decades, we use a plastic type ball filled with air, called opacifier, replacing TiO2 white pigment. You have to be careful because when the plastic balls collapse, efficiency is gone too.

Thanks again, Gil.

You answer appears correct...the color of an object depends on the light source (a specific spectrum of frequencies), some absorbance (according to Beer's law) of some frequencies by the substance, and the resulting spectrum transmitted/reflected.

Snow acts like a bunch of billions of optic fibers in a random array wich refracts and scatters incomming light in all directions, this mixes all visible colors into white (thus its appearence), but underneat, snow is compressed and acts more like a lens that collects all incomming light from outer snow layers and shows the apparent color of the sky at that moment.

Have you dug into snow under a bright red sunset?.

Yahlasit

Hello Guest,

After Johannes Innes from Bauhaus, Germany before the "Big Calamity", we have only three colours, red, yellow, and blue, and black and white are not colours. It's late and I am hungry, Gil.

The snow is blue. Here's why. When you dig a hole, even in snow, the hole is going to be dark. The only light that can easily get in comes from above; the sky. Notice that the questions states 'around 10:00 AM'. Usually the sun is low in the winter at 10am and this also prevents any direct sunlight from getting in; which contains longer wave length light (red) which can then mix with the blue light and wash out the effect. We have a blue sky because the air scatters the shorter light waves (blue) much easier than than longer waves (red). This is why the moon turns red during an eclipse since the red rays get through the atomsphere and the blue rays are blocked or scattered. Any light then reaching into the hole comes from the blue sky. If you illuminate snow with blue light it will look blue. If our sky was red or orange, then the snow would look red or orange. You could dig a hole in the summer and put a white sheet in and get the same effect.

Each snowflake is crystallized around a particle, the same particles that through refraction make the sky blue from their effect on sunlight. The denser 'atmosphere' of snow is effected the same way.

To paraphrase Hermes Trismestigus; 'As above, so below, to the accomplishment of all things.'

Just guessing.