Fake Snow Over the US?

The latest rumours to spread over the Internet relating to the grand old “chemtrails” conspiracy saga are the claims that the recent snow showers in the United States are fake.

Yes. Fake snow.

Such rumours assert that the “white stuff” is actually the result of experiments by the government relating to chemtrails and “weather weapons” (the theory that the government is trying to harness weapons that can control the weather)

However what we have here is a rather silly conspiracy theory, that thankfully is rather easy to debunk.

The rumours regarding fake snow are primarily spreading through online videos showing the bemused narrator trying to melt a handful of snow and getting confused by several facts – namely that the snow doesn’t melt, or when it does melt there is no water, and that the snow appears to burn.

What the creators of these videos do not understand is that when you pick up a handful of snow, whilst you may think what you are holding is essentially ice, you’d be wrong. Snow as it lies on the ground is mostly air, encompassed by very thin layers of ice (snowflakes). Depending on what type of snow you have, the volume of air is often substantially bigger than the volume of frozen water.

Even if you compact the snow, the volume of air is still much greater than that of ice.

This in effect causes the snow to be what you can refer to as an “iced sponge”. This helps explain the results you see in the videos of people trying to melt the snow, as we go into more detail now….

The snow doesn’t melt!?

One of the main assertions is the snow did not melt. In most of the videos claiming the snow to be fake that we have watched, the snow did in fact melt, albeit at a slower pace that the creator of the video was probably expecting.

The below image from one of the popular videos shows melted snow. The theory that the snow is not melting is likely derived simply from the expectation of the person holding the lighter to the snow and expecting it to melt faster.

If that person was to put the snow between their hands, or in a microwave or heated saucepan, they would achieve much faster results than using a lighter. Of course none of this happened in the video.

So the notion that the snow doesn’t melt is demonstrably false from the videos themselves.

The snow produces no water!?

In one of the popular videos, a man takes a blowtorch to a piece of snow and is bemused by the lack of water.

As we mentioned before, snow is mostly air. This causes snow to act as a sort of sponge which soaks up water to create what we know as slush. Slush is snow mixed with water. Putting a blowtorch to snow will initially create slush as the “unmelted” snow captures the water, thus the lack of water on the tabletop. The man in the video however failed to melt all of the snow and the man stopped halfway. If he were to continue then there would be only water left (the water that did not evaporate).

The man then produced a similar experiment with an ice cube. However an ice cube contains very little air, and thus will not act as a sponge, thus the water that does not evaporate will be visible on the tabletop.

The snow burns!?

On no video we watched did the snow actually burn. In nearly all the cases we saw the person filming the video assumed the snow was burning because black burn marks appeared on the snow.

However these burn marks are soot from the lighter (which is often being placed far too close to the snow), not because the snow is burning. If you put a lighter close enough to any surface, flammable or non-flammable, you will eventually see black marks appear. This is not necessarily an indication that the surface is burning, however.

(Editor’s note: I can assure worried readers from across the Atlantic that I myself have previously made snow “burn” (i.e. turn black) many, many years ago here in the UK, though I do forget the reasons why exactly.)

The snow smells!

The geniuses in these videos are almost certainly not smelling the snow, unless they unwittingly picked up something in the snow that would smell when burnt.

In all likelihood, unusual smells were probably detected after the person performing the experiment inadvertently or purposely burnt something else and mistaken the smell for that of the snow – or they were smelling the odour produced from the lighter itself (which can smell from anything between a “gassy” smell to burning plastic, depending on the quality of the lighter).

Given how easy this is to debunk, many counter-videos (thankfully outnumbering the original conspiracy videos) have popped up on the Internet showing that yes, the snow does indeed melt when the appropriate experiment is applied.

Sadly this is nothing more than another silly conspiracy theory perpetrated by people who place no precedent on facts or common sense.