Why is snow white? - Deepstash
Why is snow white?

Why is snow white?

Curated from: livescience.com

Ideas, facts & insights covering these topics:

2 ideas

ยท

847 reads

3

Explore the World's Best Ideas

Join today and uncover 100+ curated journeys from 50+ topics. Unlock access to our mobile app with extensive features.

Why snow is white

It has everything to do with optics.

  • When light strikes a smooth flat surface like ice, its visible rays generally pass straight through without their paths being disturbed. This is why glass and ice often appear clear.
  • When light strikes irregular surfaces, it reflects and scatters in all directions. This applies to snowflakes, which are made up of hundreds of teeny-tiny ice crystals varying in shape and structure.
  • Because the light that strikes the glass shards or snowflakes is reflected back equally, these rays include all of the composite wavelength colors of visible light (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet), which together, look white.

45

525 reads

"Snow-bow" of colors

  • Snowpack, icebergs and glaciers can sometimes appear blue when light enters their bellies through cracks and crevices (rather than reflecting off of their surfaces) and gets trapped.
  • Pink or red-tinted snow( "watermelon snow") has also been documented. Its color comes because of a type of cold-loving freshwater algae living within the snowpack, which is red.

29

322 reads

IDEAS CURATED BY

amir_amir

My thoughts

Amir L's ideas are part of this journey:

How to Run an Effective Meeting

Learn more about personaldevelopment with this collection

How to set clear objectives

How to follow up after a meeting

How to manage time effectively

Related collections

Similar ideas

Why Is the Sky Blue?

1 idea

Blissfully Cool Facts About Ice

8 ideas

Read & Learn

20x Faster

without
deepstash

with
deepstash

with

deepstash

Personalized microlearning

โ€”

100+ Learning Journeys

โ€”

Access to 200,000+ ideas

โ€”

Access to the mobile app

โ€”

Unlimited idea saving

โ€”

โ€”

Unlimited history

โ€”

โ€”

Unlimited listening to ideas

โ€”

โ€”

Downloading & offline access

โ€”

โ€”

Supercharge your mind with one idea per day

Enter your email and spend 1 minute every day to learn something new.

Email

I agree to receive email updates