Monday, January 19, 2009

The Colour of Snow

The colour of snow is white. But water is colourless. How is it then that if snow is made from water that it became white?.

Snow can be many colours depending on the conditions. Snow can be blue in colour when it is very close together. This is very common in the blue ice of glaciers.

Snow is tiny ice crystals stuck together. If you looked at an ice crystal by itself, you would see that the ice crystal is also clear. But snow is different. When snow forms, hundreds of tiny ice crystals stick together to form snowflakes.

The reason we see snow in the first place is because of the light. As snow falls through the air and lands on the ground, light is reflected off the surface of the ice crystals. Some of the light is scattered.

Visible light from the sun is made up of many wavelengths of light. Our eyes illustrate as different colors. When light hits an object, different wavelengths of light are absorbed and some are reflected back to our eyes.

No one can only see one snowflake at a time. Lots of times we see many snowflakes on the ground. As light hits the snow on the ground, there are so many locations for light to be reflected, that no single wavelength of light gets absorbed with anything continuously. All of the white light from the sun hitting the snow will reflect back and still be white light. Then snow on the ground appears white.




















These are Algaes that make the snow different colour.

http://nai.arc.nasa.gov/team/index.cfm?page=projectreports&year=8&teamID=14&projectID=1826

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