What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Is Snow Fake?

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Memphis city council members Pearl Eva Walker and Yolanda Cooper Sutton (and many other people online) say that snow is fake.

Sutton recently posted a video on her Facebook page to demonstrate the artificiality of snow. Over footage of her husband holding a snowball and a lighter, Sutton says, "So we decided to see what was really hitting the ground." Her husband holds a flame to the snowball, and it does not melt.

“It’s not melting [it stinks] when you set fire to it OMG, Jesus Christ, what is happening!!!” Sutton asks.

In the video's comment section, fellow council member Walker reportedly replied, "man made," and included another video showing the same phenomenon. It looks like that specific video was taken down, but these kinds of posts are pretty common after snowstorms like the ones that just blanketed the US. Here are a couple of examples:

So: What's happening? Has plastic snow replaced the real stuff? Is this a flurry of misinformation? Are all these people just flakes?

All available evidence suggest snow is real

First, snow is real, but I understand why the Memphis council members would be suspicious. These videos are convincing, and they're not AI nor the result of people deliberately hoaxing with prop snow. They are documents of what happens when you hold a flame up to real, actual, fell-from-the-sky snow. You'd expect that holding fire to a snowball would make it melt into water in your hand but it just doesn't. No shade to people running their own experiments, but they're missing that snow can be counterintuitive.

Why it seems like snow doesn't melt from flames

Snow is 90–95% air, so there's a lot less water than people might expect no matter how it melts. But the main thing going on is sublimation—a solid changing directly to a gas without first becoming liquid. When you hold a flame to snow, especially packed snow, much of it will become water vapor without becoming liquid water first. Sublimation is also why snow can seem to disappear without the temperature going above freezing. You can see sublimation in action in the video below.

Snow is also porous. When a snowball melts, water is sucked to the center of the mass through capillary action, and it fills up the spaces that were once air. The video below shows unpacked snow on the ground being hit with a torch. Some of the snow is sublimating in response to the heat, while some of the surface snow is melting into water and being sucked into the empty spaces in the snow below it. You can see how it goes from "powdery" snow to more wet snow by the end of the video. (Also, these yahoos are going to burn down the trailer soon):

But what about the snow turning black?

The scorch marks on the "burning snow" have an explanation as well: The flame from a match or a lighter is result of fuel burning—butane from a lighter; wood or paper from matches. As the fuel burns, it produces carbon soot, which reacts to the cold snow by condensing onto its surface. The soot isn't scorch marks from the snow burning. It's scorch marks from the butane or wood/paper burning. You can tell the snow itself isn't burning, because it never catches fire.

That leaves only the burning plastic smell that some report. That's actually the smell of the butane from the lighter not fully burning and/or the smell of the mercaptans sometimes added to butane so we can smell it. The result is a chemical odor that is easy to mistake for burning plastic, especially when you hold a flame up to soot you've already deposited on a cold surface. In this video, the conspiracy theorist used a candle instead of a lighter, and notes that it doesn't smell like burning plastic. That's because butane was absent.

How to do the "burning snow" illusion yourself

You can try all this yourself to amaze your friends with the wonders of sublimation and/or trick a bunch of people on social media. It's easy:

• Grab some snow and pack it into a tight snowball. A more solid surface will help soot stick to it.

• Apply flame from a standard butane lighter for a few seconds. If you use matches, you won't get the same burning plastic smell.

• Cool scorch mark, right? Note how little water is dripping and how the snow is "disappearing."

• Note the edges of the scorch mark. Here's where water that did melt was pulled toward the center of the snowball.

• If you want to debunk the snow-burn conspiracy, simply hold the snow in your hand instead, and you will find that it melts into water.

Is it possible to make fake snow?

What if the government wanted to create a fake snow storm for some reason? It's possible—you can see fake snow at ski resorts during bad winters; you can buy your own snow-maker on Amazon for less than $100. The problem would be the scale. All "they control the weather" conspiracies fall apart when you consider the scale.

Artificial snow is produced by spraying a mist of pressurized water into air that's below freezing. You could cover some trails at a ski resort without a problem, but a whole city or state would require a lot of snow. Industrial snow-making-machines use about 160,000 gallons of water to create one-acre-foot of snow. To cover a town that's 25 square miles with six inches of snow, you'd need about 1.28 billion gallons of water pumping through thousands of snow-guns. It would cost a lot, use a ton a fuel, and it wouldn't fool anyone anyway—those machines are loud as hell, and the snow wouldn't fall from the sky; it would shoot out of snow guns. You'd end up like, "What am I even doing with my life?"

You could also try seeding existing clouds with silver iodide to try to make it snow, but that's expensive too, and no one really one knows if it works at all.

Bottom line: We can't control the weather

Humankind can collectively alter weather patterns—global climate change and all that—but we can't control weather. We can't make it snow on command in Memphis without anyone noticing thousands of roaring machines shooting artificial snow into the air any more than we can control hurricanes. The snow falling from the sky is real and it's made of frozen water crystals, just like it always has been.