Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Red Snow

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

Thanks to green algae, there's such a thing as red snow. And we've recently found it can accelerate global warming. Look out!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Some people can't stay in the rain, but at Vessi, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything but. Imagine your favorite sneaker styles, super charged with waterproof tech. So when everyone else is staying in, you're getting out for a walk with your pup and jumping in puddles like a kid again. Because with waterproof shoes, there's nothing stopping you. Head to Vessi.com. That's V-E-S-S-I dot com and see for yourself.

Vessi, come alive in the rain. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. This is short stuff. That's right. What were you going to say? I was saying, yeah, I was wrapping up my little song. Oh, man.

Can we start over? Sure. All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome to short stuff. I'm Chuck. Hey, wait a minute. This is going wrong already.

All right, we're here to talk about red snow. And this, the origin material here was from our old friends at howstuffworks.com and Mark Mancini with his article, The Amazing and Alarming Science Behind Red Snow. Yes, because snow is not supposed to be red. And when the snow turns red, you know things have gotten biblical. I thought you were about to say like a rhyming term. I could have.

I chose not to specifically. When the snow turns red, that means you're not going to enjoy the future. It's kind of what that means. I thought it was great. Mark Mancini went to the trouble of saying like, okay, snow is normally white and here's why. And I feel like we should honor his work by mentioning it to you. Let's hear it.

Why is it white? Oh, because the crystals that make up ice or snow scatter all colors on the visible wavelength. So everything's reflected back as just white because they all mix together. No color gets absorbed and so the snow doesn't seem like blue or red normally. It can turn red. And it's actually, we've known it turns red once in a while for a very long time. This is news to me, but apparently as far back as Pliny the Elder. Him again.

Yeah, I love that guy. He was writing from 23 to 79 CE. And he wrote about red tinted snow as well. Yeah, I mean, Pliny the Elder wrote about red snow. I think in the middle ages, there were people talking about red snow. Sure. There's a guy named Randall Cervini who it looks like Mark might have actually interviewed for this article in this Randall wrote a book as a professor at Arizona State University called

Freaks of the Storm, which is about kind of wacky weather. And there was a chapter on red snow and he said, you know, Charles Darwin saw red snow and the Andes Mountains. It was white and when it turned red as it thawed. And so a lot of like very famous people in history have been kind of freaked out by seeing this phenomenon. I don't know at what point we figured this out, but apparently by the time Darwin was around in the mid 19th century and seeing red snow and the Andes, he knew what it was. So like at least by the mid 19th century, we knew that red snow, it turns out,

is actually caused by green algae of all things. Yeah. And that's, you know, we'll get in after the jump to exactly what's going on there. It can also, you can get like reddish pinkish hues if like Saharan dust blows like into Europe or something like that. That's not the kind of red snow we're talking about. Right. We're talking about, and if you see pictures of like legit red snow and as it melts, red

water flows and waterfalls all over the world. And like you said, it's green algae, specifically, Clamidominus root Nivalus. Very nice. I practiced it too. I think you nailed it. Let's hear your version. Clamidinus Nivalus. It sounds like we both just cast a magic spell either way though.

I'd love Latin for that reason. All right. Well, let's take an early break since that's a pseudo cliffhanger. Maybe that's what we just conjured was a break. And we'll tell you all about how green algae can turn white snow red right after this. Some people can't stand the rain, but at Vessi, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything but imagine your favorite sneaker styles supercharged with waterproof tech.

So whenever you're out sustaining in, you're getting out for a walk with your pup and jumping in puddles like a kid again. Because with waterproof shoes, there's nothing stopping you. Head to Vessi.com. That's V-E-S-S-I dot com and see for yourself. Vessi, come alive in the rain. The thing that I most know you about is other people's finances. I just want to ask people how much money do you make and what have you figured out about money

that the rest of us haven't? I'm Maya Lau and this is Other People's Pockets, the show where I ask people about their money because salary transparency is important and because we can all learn something from other people's financial mistakes and money hacks. On this show, we talk about money in actual dollar amounts. Like, how much does a Hollywood writer make? How does an elite scientist wind up unhoused? What's it like to make it as a big-time journalist and then lose practically everything?

I talk to my guests about how they were raised, how they deal with their money anxieties, and of course, what's in their bank accounts. So get your pay stubs out. Other People's Pockets is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and Little Everywhere. Listen to Other People's Pockets on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so Climita Monus, Climita Monus, yeah, Nivalis is a type of green algae, like we said, but we've been talking about red snow. And the reason, well, let me tell you a little bit more about this green algae first before we get into why.

It's, I've seen it written about as a cryophilic micro eukaryote, meaning it loves the cold and it's a very tiny eukaryote. It's like La Niña means the niña. It's from the kingdom plantae. It's a plant, but it's also mobile. It's very, very bizarre in no small part because again, it's green and it's a plant, but it lives in high altitude snow fields like the Arctic or in the Andes Mountains. And it's green, but it produces a red pigment called astaxanthin during warm seasons.

And here's the crux of everything. If green algae didn't produce astaxanthin, we probably would not be talking about it right now. Yeah, that's a good point. This stuff is pretty interesting. There's a biologist named Arwin Edwards, who I think was also interviewed for this article, who says that this red pigment acts kind of like a sunscreen. It helps protect the organisms from excessive solar radiation during the warm seasons. And so what happens is during the wintertime, these organisms go dormant, spring springs,

and then they come to the surface and bloom, but it can't just bloom as in snow. Like algae needs liquid water to bloom. So as the snow melts, it becomes more of that sort of wet snow. And that's when the algae really starts blooming in the wet snow. Those algal cells get going and they photosynthesize. And this is where that red pigment comes about. Yeah, and so if you get a bunch of these things together, and a lot of them can get together, a single millimeter of snow, I guess a cubic millimeter,

can contain half a million of these individuals. So there's a lot of them. And when you put a lot of them together, the snow turns red. And not just like, oh, it looks kind of reddish, especially when it melts. It is like a puddle of blood. It looks like basically semi-translucent blood. It's that red. It's pretty cool looking, in other words.

And there's a problem though with it turning red, because like you said, it needs a little bit of melted snow to start to bloom, to make it to the surface and start to thrive. But after it gets that initial foothold, it kind of takes over itself. Because that red pigment absorbs way more solar radiation than white snow. White snow reflects everything, right? So white snow can stay colder longer. If you've ever seen a snow pile that got put in the corner of a parking lot

in the Midwest or North and is still there in like May, that's because that snow is reflecting back all of that solar radiation or a lot of it. If that was red, it'd be melted by February. That's the saying. And this stuff is red. So the more it blooms, the more it absorbs heat, the more it warms the surrounding snow, the more the snow melts. Yeah. I mean, that white car that you have is going to be less hot than your red car

and certainly your black car. That's why you see so many white cars in hot places with a hot climate, like out in the desert. And it's the same deal here. So as this stuff turns red, like you said, it sort of becomes a cycle, a feedback loop where it starts melting more and more stuff. And then that in turn, you know, can spread the algae and all of a sudden you might have a legit problem on your hands and Nature Magazine thinks that's the case.

In 2016, they published a report under the leadership of Stephanie Lutz, I believe from the University of Leeds, and they're basically saying, hey, there's about a five to 15% acceleration of glacier melting rates because of this algae on the surface because it's darker. Yeah. And we should say this is not so new freak of nature. Like this has always been going on. The reason that it's alarming, according to that 2016 paper from Nature, is that like you just said, they're accelerating snowmelt.

And because global temperatures are warming and Arctic snowmelt is really important to climate change in general, they're saying like, we need to take this into effect when we start making our climate models for glacial melting. And no one has until or no one did until 2016. But their paper was so essentially irrefutable, they did exactly what they set out to do. Now people start to include red snow blooms into climate models. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of that simple. It's speeding things up.

And they're including it in those models because that feedback loop is happening and you can't just, you have to include all the variables and this officially counts as a variable. Yes. So yeah, you couldn't make a prediction of like what kind of glacial melt you're going to see is the temperature warms without taking that into account. It might, they might melt way faster, 15% faster than you would account for. And your seawall wouldn't be built in time. So TS for you, you should have taken red snow into account. That's right. One final little button on this.

Thanks to Mr. Mancini. We now have learned that apparently this algae smells like watermelon. I think who they interviewed said that they didn't smell it themselves. But there are people that have reported this red pigment off gases, a watermelon-y like smell. Yes. But Mark Mancini warns, don't eat it. Nah. Apparently the people have eaten and have blamed red snow for gastric problems. And that's just not correct. It's probably something else in the snow, but don't eat it anyway. Yeah. Don't eat the yellow snow. That's what Frank Zappa said. Yeah. And don't eat the red snow because we told you by way of our friends at howstoveworks.com.

That's the Chuck Bryant corollary. That's right. Well, Chuck said that's right, everybody. That means short stuff is out.