When winter doesn’t hold up its end of the snow bargain (we’re looking at you, this winter), ski areas often make their own, using devices like the one above and plenty of water. A short piece on the New York Times site describes the moment in 1950 when modern snowmaking was invented, when Wayne Pierce, an employee at Mohawk Mountain in Connecticut, improved upon the owner’s plan of trucking in tons of shredded ice:
He figured that a drop of water, propelled through below-freezing air, would turn into a snowflake, [colleague Arthur] Hunt recalled. Along with Dave Richey, their partner in a ski factory, they slapped together a spray-gun nozzle, a 10-horsepower compressor and a garden hose into something of a D.I.Y. snow gun. They experimented with it all night. “By morning,” Hunt wrote, “we had a 20-inch pile of snow over a diameter of 20 feet.” The contraption was later used at Mohawk Mountain.
Snowmaking has since developed quite a bit. While early attempts at snowmaking used just water, these days a special mixture of dirt and water is used to get natural freezing: as we’ve written before, ice crystals usually need a particle to coalesce around, which can be a bit of dirt or even bacteria floating in the atmosphere. These particles are called nucleators.
In fact, with the right nucleators added in, ski areas don’t even have to wait until temperatures get really cold to start snowmaking. The air temperature has to get down to 18 °F before snowmaking can take place, using plain old water. But with a few other things added in, Chemical and Engineering News notes, that changes.
When the temperature isn’t quite cold enough–above about –5 °C (23 °F)–snowmakers need little helpers in the form of seed materials added to the water to generate nucleation sites. Silver iodide, kaolin, soaps and detergents, and fungi or lichens are among the materials that have been used.
Currently, the most popular additive is Snomax, a freeze-dried protein powder sold by York Snow, Victor, N.Y. Snomax is derived from Pseudomonas syringae, a common bacterium found on grasses, trees, and vegetable crops. In the 1970s, plant pathologists studying the frost sensitivity of corn plants at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, discovered that the bacteria were responsible for initializing ice crystallization.
As cool as the chemistry behind it is, though, snowmaking is not really a replacement for getting snow the natural way, at least not as far as the environmental impact is concerned. As you can imagine, making that much snow takes a huge amount of water and energy, and it’s expensive: an acre of foot-deep snow can cost up to $2,000, the NYT reports. One has to wonder, where do ski resorts pull that water from, and how does intense snowmaking activity, as must be happening in the Northeastern US this year, affect the local water table?
Image courtesy of Tim in Sydney / flickr
February 21st, 2012 at 1:50 pm
I would imagine that if it was going to mess with the water table it would be to add water, since it’s still going to melt in spring just like real snow would have.
February 21st, 2012 at 5:14 pm
It won’t necessarily add water to the *local* water table, in fact it almost certainly won’t. The water resulting from snowmelt ends up far away from its original melting spot, sometimes hundreds of miles away in the watershed.
February 21st, 2012 at 8:42 pm
Given the warm winter, I’ve been reading a lot of stories about artifical snow making this year. There’s few fake snow companies like MagicSnow in Hollywood (http://www.magicsnow.com) that can make faux snow in any climate. Even above 18 degrees.
February 21st, 2012 at 10:56 pm
Of course ski areas have reservoirs for snow making. It’s the only practical method of assuring that the volume is ready to deliver when conditions are right. Energy usage and associated pollution is a more interesting topic. For those of us who ski, while we hope that the efficiencies continue to improve, there’s no doubt that “it’s worth it”…
February 22nd, 2012 at 6:00 am
Water tables are filled slowly from seeps. The run-off is just that. Very little if any will make it into the water table unless it is a dry winter.
It woulld mess with water table if the water to make the snow came from the water table.
February 22nd, 2012 at 7:12 am
So, how do I make acres of snow? This just seems to tell me the history of snowmaking. Not what equipment I need to do it myself.
February 22nd, 2012 at 12:25 pm
We’ve burned enough fossil fuels to make the planet too warm to make it’s own snow in winter, so we’re going to burn more fossil fuels to make fake snow just so people can continue to go skiing in the winter? Has anyone run any tests on what affect these additives are having on the surrounding areas? What is the run-off doing to the plants, fish, and other life?