It’s hard to say for sure why conspiracy theories have been running hot in pandemic times — possibly people trying to make sense of an increasingly complicated and dangerous world, possibly the bad faith actions of misinformation campaigns, possibly too many people who just have too much time on their hands finding all the wrong ways to make connections online — but the result is a lot of bizarre nonsense spreading across social media.
Probably the most prominent theory over the past year has involved the notion of microchips somehow being added to COVID-19 vaccines for…reasons. It’s a theory that has duped a lot of people, some of whom went so far as to spread schematics of a guitar pedal that they thought was the microchip in question.
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Others were tricked into buying a Faraday cage that would block their own wifi signals out of fear of 5G internet. And even Bill Gates’s daughter couldn’t resist taking a swipe at all the conspiracy theories involving her father.
The latest and possibly least likely conspiracy theory making the rounds, however, is that snow is fake.
As The Independent reported, probably in response to an unusual, and unusually deadly — but not unprecedented — winter storm and cold snap that spread all the way south to Texas, people online are sharing videos that suggest that the snow that has fallen out of the sky, clogging up roads and blanketing neighborhoods, is not real.
The “proof” in these videos involves attempts to burn the snow.
In several videos, people have held flames up against snowballs to show it failing to melt.
And in some, they note that the flame leaves a blackened surface on the snowball without any water dripping off.
In one video, a woman holds a lighter up to a snowball and says “This goes out to our government and Bill Gates. Thank you Bill Gates for trying to [expletive] trick us that this is real snow.”
“You’ll see it’s not melting and it’s going to burn. Snow don’t burn. Snow [expletive] melts. No water, no dripping, no nothing. If I put this [expletive] in the microwave, it’s going to start sparking because there’s metal mixed in with it.”
In another, a woman holding snow taken from her lawn over a tea light notes the same thing.
The snow doesn’t melt, and there’s a small black patch where the flame was.
Apart from the one woman’s suggestion that the supposedly fake snow contained metal, none propose theories as to what the snow is actually made of — is it supposed to be couch stuffing? Carpet fibers? Soap flakes or dehydrated mashed potatoes?
And where is Bill Gates supposed to fit into all of this? How would fake snow benefit him in any way?
But there’s real, legit science behind the snow not melting when a flame is held against it: sublimation.
That’s the process in which a substance changes its state from a solid to gas, bypassing the melting phase.
It’s something that had to be explained when the whole “fake snow” phenomenon come around before, back in 2014 after the Southeast, including Virginia and Atlanta, received a heavy snowfall.
WTVR News in Richmond, Virginia, did a nice explainer video that broke it all down. “When you heat something like this, it goes from a solid to a gas,” meteorologist Mike Stone said, holding a lighter up to a snowball. “It’s called sublimation. This is actually disappearing by going into vapor.”
There’s a good and proper reason for the scorch marks on the snow as well.
Katie Nickalaou, a meteorologist for CBS 14, made a video of her own to show what that’s all about: combustion. Basically, the source of the flame, be it candle or lighter, requires fuel. In the chemical reaction that produces the flame, that fuel gets transformed and expelled, just like the exhaust from your car — and it shows up quite nicely on a snowy white background.
So there you have it: no, snow is not fake, and the videos trying to prove it just show snow being snow.
h/t: The Independent
