\n <\/p>\n
Sn\u00f6: A History Sverker S\u00f6rlin Doubleday (2025)<\/p>\n
As a child growing up in northern Sweden, environmental historian Sverker S\u00f6rlin fell in love with snow. \u201cI see the light outside, before I even open the slatted blinds. Snow! The miracle of whiteness is shining through the slats,\u201d he recalls in his latest book, Sn\u00f6.<\/p>\n
Now, he fights for snow\u2019s survival. And survive it must, S\u00f6rlin argues, if we\u2019re to avoid droughts, sinking tundra fields and an overheated planet. With amazing anecdotes, emotive memories and pleas for climate action, Sn\u00f6 aims to galvanize readers.<\/p>\n
Glaciers are not just blocks of ice \u2014 plans to save them mustn\u2019t overlook their hidden life<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
A skiing trip to Norway\u2019s Rondane Mountains marked a transcendent moment for S\u00f6rlin. After sundown, dozens of puddles started freezing over in the grass around his campsite, each making a distinct cracking sound. S\u00f6rlin felt at one with \u201cthe forces of nature, the whole solar system, at play in a condensed timescale\u201d.<\/p>\n
Snow\u2019s distinctive soundscapes captivate. For instance, when microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier arrived in eastern Sweden to study the CRISPR gene-editing technology for which she won the 2020 chemistry Nobel prize, she heard the snow crunching under her feet whisper \u201ccrispr, crispr\u201d.<\/p>\n
And contrary to the myth, our voices are nowhere near loud enough to trigger an avalanche. With a pressure of 20 pascals, even the sound of a jet aeroplane taking off wouldn\u2019t trigger a snowslide, and a human shriek hits just one-tenth of that. By contrast, a sonic boom creates 200 pascals, which certainly could shift some snow. Despite this evidence, S\u00f6rlin still wonders, \u201cIf I stood there on the loose snow again \u2026 would I really dare to scream?\u201d<\/p>\n
S\u00f6rlin celebrates people who have sought answers to snow\u2019s scientific mysteries.<\/p>\n
In northern Japan in the 1930s, physicist Ukichiro Nakaya undertook fieldwork in the Hokkaido Mountains, which are notorious for their immense snowstorms. In perishing conditions, Nakaya grew obsessed with explaining the variety of snow crystals. By creating individual snowflakes on rabbit hairs in a low-temperature laboratory, Nakaya could assess the impacts of temperature and humidity on the crystals\u2019 shape. Each of these \u2018letters from heaven\u2019 held crucial data about the atmospheric conditions in which they formed.<\/p>\n
Children make the most of a snowy day in Kabul.<\/span>Credit: Wakil Kohsar\/AFP\/Getty<\/span><\/p>\n Other snow-obsessed characters include Willi Dansgaard, a \u201cbrusque young physicist with wide-ranging interests and an unquenchable curiosity\u201d, who worked, starting in the 1960s, with ice cores drilled from Greenland\u2019s ice sheet. In the ice cores, Dansgaard\u2019s team found snow dating back millennia, retaining what S\u00f6rlin calls \u201catmospheric labelling \u2026 a kind of microscopic message in a bottle\u201d.<\/p>\n Climate change reveals secrets of our ancestors hidden in the ice<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Greenland\u2019s ice-core chemistry revealed sudden climate changes, tying in with Dansgaard\u2019s interest as to why Norse communities left the island in the Middle Ages. Studies suggest that a drying climate was responsible for Norse people\u2019s disappearance in the fifteenth century, because less grass was available for livestock in winter (B. Zhao et al. Sci. Adv. 8, eabm4346; 2022).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sn\u00f6: A History Sverker S\u00f6rlin Doubleday (2025) As a child growing up in northern Sweden, environmental historian Sverker S\u00f6rlin fell in love with snow. \u201cI see the light outside, before I even open the slatted blinds. Snow! The miracle of whiteness is shining through the slats,\u201d he recalls in his latest book, Sn\u00f6. Now, he<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27994,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[16670,4822,2475,16669,776],"class_list":{"0":"post-27993","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-disappears","9":"tag-mysteries","10":"tag-race","11":"tag-snows","12":"tag-uncover"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/27994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}