about snow...

About snow...
The Inuit have numerous words for different types of snow, but I am relatively sure there is no word in their language for the snow we have at the South Pole. I've never experienced snow like this before. Imagine taking a piece of styrofoam and putting it through a grinder so that it's completely pulverized into pieces smaller than grains of sand.
It even sounds like styrofoam when you walk on it.
Kicking a small chunk produces a sound similar to glass tumbling over concrete.
You can't make a snowball with it.
It doesn't compact at all.
Driving over it just loosens it up and walking over it is like walking on sand at the beach. It seems that the only thing that compacts it is walking over it one hundred times or so.
The cool thing about it (probably the ONLY cool thing about it) is that it's so light. The water content in this snow is extremely low, so that the flakes (if you can actually call them 'flakes'. There is no snowflake shape to these 'flakes', they are more like single crystals) don't weigh much and can easily become airborne. This is most likely how the majority of snow at the Pole actually gets here, it is carried by the winds.
It doesn't snow at the South Pole very much, only 3-5 cm per year, whereas the actual accumulation of snow is around 20 cm per year.
OK, back to the airborne part...
When the wind picks up the snow and blows it around, it can do some pretty interesting things;
For one, the ice crystals blowing around on a sunny day make everything glittery, like someone is sprinkling fairy dust around. On one of these type of days, when the sun is out, and the wind is blowing in the right direction in relation to the sun and the ice crystals are aligned properly, one can see a really interesting meteorological phenomenon called "Sun Dogs". This is a huge rainbow-colored halo around the sun and on the left and right of the sun, inside the rainbow, are two very bright spots of light, Sun Dogs. On a REALLY good day, and we only had one of these, there is a second halo around the first halo and above the second halo, a U-shaped rainbow of light. It's a truly incredible thing to see.