Snow day!

Grab some hot cocoa and a warm blanket and let’s talk about the tiny crystals that fall from the sky. Guest: Jessica Lundquist, professor of civil & environmental engineering at the University of Washington For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  Anyone who listens to Unexplainable knows that music is really important to me. So I want an amazing sound system. But I also want something that's easy, that just works. Sonos delivers on all fronts. The sound is incredible and my Sonos system follows me wherever I go. I can mix and match speakers in any room in my apartment, louder in the living room, quieter in the kitchen. And the Sonos app makes it all super easy. Visit sonos.com and build your system. Sonos, love the sound, feel the system.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the US gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000. Always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats. According to consumeradvocate.org, you get paid back up to 90% of vet bills at any vet in the US and Canada, with claims paid back in as little as two days. Go to fetchpet.com/save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com/save.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  All right. It is the day after a very intense snowstorm here in New York City. And my editor, Joanna, came up with the idea that I should go outside and talk to people about the snow. So I am looking out at what can only be described as a winter wonderland. Everything is truly covered. It's like not a blanket. This is, it's covered in a quilt of snow. It's fluffy and white and charming and cold. I don't want to go outside. Oh, it's so windy. Do you hear that? All right, let's go.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  A few weeks ago, I had an extremely nice time wandering around the streets of Brooklyn in Prospect Park and talking to people about the snow.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  I can say this park, it's beautiful. It has a lot of trees and all of the trees are really snowy. I can see a lot of snowmen. There's a huge snowman over there. Like, I don't know how to say it in feet, but I can say it's at least 160 centimeters.

• 2:36Speaker 04

  We realized this morning that this was the best snowman-making snow that I've ever seen. And so we made this snowman this morning. Now we're back to give it a personality. Is that about something up?

• 2:50Speaker 03

  Help.

• 2:50Speaker 04

  Help what? You're about to slip?

• 2:52Speaker 03

  Well, we already built a snowman, and we frolicked in the park. So now we're gonna go get some hot cocoa.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  I talked to people who were shoveling their rockways, going sledding, going skiing.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  I'm wearing my cross-country skis from high school.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  How are you fitting cross-country skis in your New York apartment?

• 3:10Speaker 03

  It's a great question.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  I talked to people with lots of thoughts on snow.

• 3:14Speaker 05

  I love working out. I love shoveling it. I cross-country ski. I just love it.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  Pro snow. Love it. Except a month from now, we still have it and it's black. Yeah. Like, once it gets disgusting like the last snow did, then I'm over it. But I like this snow for right now.

• 3:30Speaker 06

  I love it from a distance. Only because if it's more we out here, other than that, I'd have been in my house. But I do love it from a distance, though.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  And I also asked people if they had questions about snow.

• 3:42Speaker 06

  Well, I know that it makes things very quiet because it absorbs sound. But I don't underst— I guess I don't know the science behind why. I did it here. I'm not sure if it's true that, like, every snowflake is different. I guess one question would be, sometimes when snow falls, like, you can't really make snowballs out of it.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  And then sometimes it's perfect like this where you can, you know, you can grab it and make a snowball. Yeah, just kind of what determines that because this feels like a totally different ballgame. So not everyone had questions for me. Not really. I kind of like not knowing, like not knowing how things. Yeah, you know what I mean?

• 4:22Speaker 06

  Okay, great. I'll go home.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  I did get enough questions that I decided to call up a snow scientist in search of some answers. So I am Byrd Pinkerton. And today on the show, I'm talking to Jessica Lundquist. She's a professor of civil and environmental engineering. And she's going to answer a whole bunch of questions about snow for us. Of course, this is unexplainable, though. So a little later in the show, she's also going to tell us some things about snow that she does not yet know and is still trying to figure out.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  All right, well, I have a bunch of questions for you as our, as our resident snow expert, I guess. Let's go. So the first question I got from a few people is actually about the shape of snowflakes.

• 5:28Speaker 03

  How was it formed? How did the design come about? Like, is there anything that makes it have a different shape, the snowflake?

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Why are snowflakes all different shapes?

• 5:38Speaker 03

  So, snowflakes will form around a tiny speck of dust called a condensation nuclei.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  But now it can grow in different ways. So you can grow out to make what we call a dendrite shape. So that's your postcard snowflake. But it could also grow down, right? So you could also get a column, which one of these you get will depend actually on the temperature and water vapor content in the atmosphere where the snowflake is being formed. Depending on the conditions in the atmosphere, it will grow in a certain way. And then it's not sitting at just one point in the atmosphere. It's often like being blown up and down to different points with different amounts of water vapor, different temperatures. And so it's often like growing differently throughout its lifetime.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  And then it has to fall from that cloud down to where we are at the surface. And it will often like hit different snowflakes and then they can aggregate and you can get these sort of messy big things.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Wait, so what you're saying to me is like the snowflake's shape is like a record of the life it's lived almost, like where it's been?

• 6:48Speaker 03

  Yes, so it's telling you about where it's been in the cloud and what it's fallen through and whether it hit another snowflake and how it grew. And if you really want to know about snowflakes, I recommend checking out Ken Liebrich, who grows them in his lab at Caltech. He can make designer snowflakes.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Every day I learn about a job that I wish I had.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Okay, so the answer to this first question of sort of like, why is every snowflake different? Is like every snowflake has its own little individual path through the atmosphere that shapes how it grows. And then also go check out this guy's designer snowflake lab.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Question two is, I got a question kind of about not how it looks, but how it sounds. So, so one of the people I met did sort of like an ASMR demonstration of the snow crunching?

• 7:51Speaker 02

  And then was asking, like, why does it crunch like that?

• 7:55Speaker 03

  So you talked about the snow, snowflake's history in the atmosphere, right? But then the snow also falls on the ground and has a history on the ground. So your snowflakes start accumulating on the ground and you have all these, you know, little individual snowflakes that fall on top of each other and they have air in between them. It's not ice, it's a pile of little snow crystals with air in between it.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Like a fluffy pillow almost, the way that your, your pillow is like a bunch of feathers.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Except this is cooler than feathers because snow is always close to its melting point. So if you think- About some material science, if you have like metal and you heat it up so you can weld it and center it, if you get your metal really close to its melting point, you can like make two points of metal actually attached to each other. So, snowflakes will do something we call centering. So you also center things with metal, but snow will center by itself just sitting there. So your snowflakes fell down, they made, you know, kind of like your feather pillow with air inside, and then your little crystals start attaching themselves to each other. So now you have this matrix of snowflakes that are attached to each other, and then underneath it,

• 9:04Speaker 03

  they have air. You could also have right at the surface, it might melt and refreeze a little bit. So they'll often be, you know, attached at the surface with air underneath. Now, your crunchy sound is you're breaking that.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Oh, you're breaking the connections that they formed.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it's only sometimes. Your snow won't always make a crunchy noise. Okay?

• 9:22Speaker 02

  So basically, like, because snow is slightly melted almost, but it has the power to stick together, it's forming all these sort of fragile bridges.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  And when you crunch it, you're just demolishing a lot of bridges all at the same time. Great. Another sound question. This is question three. Why does snow absorb sound?

• 9:49Speaker 03

  Okay, and this, it doesn't always do that either. So one thing is, snowflakes are all different. The snow on the ground is also all different. So sometimes it might make a crunching sound, and sometimes it might absorb sound. So when it most absorbs sound is right after new snowfall. So it hasn't yet had time to make all these centering connections. You just have a whole bunch of little snowflakes just loosely lying at surface. So think of kind of like your feather pillow, not yet attached, but lots of air in between it. So the sound gets kind of muffled by going into all those air pockets in the snow and doesn't get reflected back to your ear. So it ends up sort of being a sound absorber because it's just loosely connected a whole bunch of air pockets.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Delightful. Okay, so then I got a lot of questions about why the snow is the way that it is. So people were talking about sort of like the texture of the snow in this storm versus the one two weeks ago.

• 10:46Speaker 05

  It seems like thicker and stickier.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  And like the fluffiness, what makes it so fluffy? One person got really descriptive. It's like AI snow.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  What do you mean?

• 10:57Speaker 06

  I feel like it was 3D printed.

• 11:01Speaker 06

  Like tempered pedic smell.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  But it was apparently like better for snowballs, better for snow building.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  And people wanted to know, like, what was going on there, essentially, like physically, chemically, whatever, to make different snows after different storms?

• 11:15Speaker 03

  Yes. So again, we talked about the history, right? It starts with their falling through the atmosphere. They fell through different atmospheres, warmer storms, cooler storms. Depending on the conditions in the atmosphere, the snow crystals grow differently and they also have different amounts of liquid water inside of them. So if you get a colder storm, you have a lot less liquid water and you end up with your dry snow. It won't make a snowball, right? So as you get warmer and you get the biggest change above negative three degrees C. So as you get between, again, when we talked about snow being really close to its melting point, right? So snow's melting point is about zero degrees C. And as you

• 11:56Speaker 03

  get really close to that, you actually get more molecules that actually are liquid. And that makes it really sticky. You can build good snowballs with warmer snow.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  One person asked how it accumulates on surfaces. And so specifically, we were talking about tree branches, and then I was thinking about wires. And I was curious if there's any interesting physics or whatever going on structurally there.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  So there are actually these amazing studies done both in Japan and in Switzerland, where they put out all these boards of different widths and different sizes, and then they just measured how much snow accumulated on all of them. The pictures in their papers are really cool.

• 12:35Speaker 03

  And they also did studies where they tried to see like, how tall could you stack snow? And like, what was the angle of repose of just a stack of snow? So these are questions that lots of people have. Well, maybe not lots of people, but it's definitely been studied quite a bit.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  It goes back to some of the things we talked about before. So how much snow you can stack up actually depends on the temperature of the snow. So again, we got back to that snow being really close to its melting point, particularly if you have a warmer snowstorm, right? And the fact that the snowflakes can center and stick to each other. So they will actually attach themselves to each other. Also, the stickiness, per se, of snow goes up hugely between. Negative three degrees C and zero degrees C. And if you think about like little bits of it will like melt and be liquid and then refreeze again. That it will sort of freeze itself onto your tree branches and your different things. And then it will attach itself by centering to each other.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  And so it's can stack up amazingly.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Wow. Okay, I'm learning a lot. Um, unrelated to structure of things. Uh, one person asked what the benefits of snow are for the environment. So like for trees or for parks, et cetera.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  Snow insulates things really well, just like in your house. The insulation is, you know, a lot of pockets of air in between two walls. Right. Your snow builds up with a lot of trapped pockets of air that insulate the temperature. So it turns out that in most, most cold regions, the temperature at the top of the snow pack above the snow is significantly colder than the temperature at the base of the snow. So if you go to the Arctic, it's often like more than 20 degrees Celsius different between the top and the bottom of the snow. So it'll be, you know, like can get negative 40 in the air. And if you're under the snow, you're super warm. So if you're out in a really cold storm, you could dig yourself a snow fort, bury yourself under the snow, you'll be warmer.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  Right. So a lot of animals live under the snow. Um, some hibernate under the snow, some many build their dens under the snow. Right. It's a warm, safe place through the winter.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  And is it, is it just animals or are there other things kind of taking advantage of this warm blanket effect?

• 15:01Speaker 03

  Plants, microbes, you know, things in the soil that are using that same insulation to survive. Like plants with shallow roots in cold regions will often have root damage if there's not a good snow year. It's kind of counterintuitive that often in years with less snow, it's colder for a lot of plants and animals because they can't hide under that blanket.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  So clearly there is a lot about snow that's no mystery to Jessica. But there are some things that Jessica does not know about snow. So after the break, it's Snow Mysteries with Jessica.

• 15:49Noam Hassenfeld?

  Support for the show comes from Sonos. Hey, Sonos, give me some music.

• 15:56Noam Hassenfeld?

  All right, one of life's great mysteries. You're listening to music in the living room. You gotta grab something from the kitchen. You don't want to take the speaker with you, but you also don't want to miss that beat drop. And this is where I introduce you to the magic of Sonos. Sonos sent me a couple of speakers to try out, so I've got to move two here in the living room. And then I walk down the hall.

• 16:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  I get in here to the kitchen, and I got a brand new Sonos Play right here on the counter. I can open the fridge, grab a seltzer.

• 16:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  And yeah, I didn't miss a second. And I can make each speaker louder or softer in the Sonos app, or if I'm using AirPlay, so I can make it louder in the kitchen without blasting whoever is still in the living room. It's all just easy, and it sounds amazing. These speakers are crisp. They've got great bass. And I'm especially impressed with the new Sonos Play. It packs this truly awesome sound in a much smaller size. So I don't know, if I want to

• 17:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  head outside for a minute.

• 17:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's super easy and yeah, pretty nice out. Visit sonos.com and build your system. Sonos, love the sound, feel the system.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Support for the show comes from TikTok. Being curious is endlessly rewarding. There are few better feelings, in my opinion, than asking a question and then having that question lead you down a rabbit hole. Might even be the beginning of a new set of interests that was not on your radar beforehand. Maybe you're looking up at the night sky one night and you start to wonder what the most distant thing you can see with a naked eye is. One place to start searching for answers to a question like that is TikTok. First, you might discover a video about the Andromeda Galaxy. And then, next thing you know, you're learning how to find different

• 18:11Speaker 02

  stars, or how to identify constellations, or how different astronomical discoveries got made, or how constellations got their names. You don't need serious equipment to make serious discoveries. You start with a simple question, and suddenly, you're somewhere you never expected to be. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore. At tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the US gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000. Always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats, according to consumeradvocate.org. You get paid back up to 90% of vet bills at any vet in the US and Canada, with claims paid back in as little as two days. Go to fetchpet.com/save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com/save.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  All schools are officially closed for a snow day.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  All right. Jessica Lundquist was patiently answering all our questions about snow. But I also had some questions about Jessica, like what got her into studying snow to begin with. She told me she grew up in California, and her favorite thing to do was to go to Yosemite.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  I just like going in the mountains and going hiking. And I went in the summer, which, you know, generally, there's no snow. But then quickly realized that the amount of water in the river that I like to jump in and go swimming was completely related to the amount of snow in the mountains.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  So you were like, I'm going to spend a great deal of my career studying this question?

• 20:10Speaker 03

  No, of course not. I said, I want to be a park ranger and just go hiking in the mountains.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  She did wind up becoming a researcher, though, not a park ranger. And she began tackling this big question related to snow.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  How much snow is there actually in the mountains?

• 20:24Speaker 02

  It turns out that on the west coast of the US, snowmelt can be an important source of water.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  So basically, in the western US, we don't have enough water for all the things we want to use water for. There's a lot of people living in the west, there's a lot of crops grown in the west. All of these need water to grow. And basically, the water is allocated to people through this water rate system. So in terms of like, what is the value of snow? It's like free reservoirs, right? It's storing that water in the winter for the summer. So people always want to know, how much water exactly do we have in the snowpack? Because it's actually so dry out here that people will be told, don't plant, right? We can't give you water this year, you can't plant your crops, you need to furlough your fields, you need to do something else.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  So a lot of what I try to do is figure out how much snow there is in the mountains at any given point in time. I mean, the job is often to predict the future, right? Can you predict how much water we'll have in the future?

• 21:31Speaker 02

  But this is easier said than done, because it's tricky to measure how much snow there is in the mountains.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  A lot of snow falls in places that don't have roads, that don't have infrastructure, they're rugged, steep terrain without, you know, a lot of access. So a lot of it's tell a place you can't go. But it also, like, it's extremely variable. So if you put out a measurement site, so the National Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS, has something that's called a snow pillow.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  So it's basically, you have like, two metal plates, you fill it with antifreeze, you put it right by the surface of the ground, and you bury it slightly so bears can't find it. The snow falls on it, squeezes the water, the antifreeze, which then creates a pressure gradient, and it tells you how much, what is the weight of the snow. Resting on this snow pillow. So basically, that weight tells you what we call the snow-water equivalent. Like, for basically for water resources, if all that snow melts, how much water do we get out of it? This is the snow-water equivalent. Or you may heard the term "swee," S-W-E, snow-water equivalent.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  I have not heard the term "swee," but I like the term "swee" quite a bit.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  That sounds great. That sounds like we have a measurement. Fantastic.

• 22:42Speaker 03

  Exactly. But if you walk 10 steps to the left, you're going to measure something completely different.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  Oh, right. Okay.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  This is somewhat less, uh, sweet.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  The same problem exists for other measurements, and satellite images can be tricky. And so Jessica and researchers like her may never be able to work out a perfect measurement of the snow in the mountains on an eegoneer. What they can work out, though, is patterns. So for many decades now, people have been taking measurements of snow in the mountains at certain spots, and then seeing how much water there ends up being in the following warm season. And that means that they can say, you know, when our measurements look like this in these various spots, there will probably be this amount of water. Emphasis on "probably," though, because the predictions are not always as neat and tidy as this makes it sound.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  So that's why I'm still employed. So the number of things can trip people up. One thing we did recently, um, so basically Colorado. Colorado River provides water for, what, seven different states, who all argue about how much water they get, and is often in the news as not having enough water. And what they've noticed is since 2000, the amount of water in the river was less than what the snow predicted. And 2021 was a particularly bad year. They thought from the snowpack, it was kind of close to average, and then it delivered way less stream flow than they thought. And so, you know, then people aren't prepared because they bought their seeds to... Plant and then they get the water cut off and they lose their crops.

• 24:22Speaker 03

  And so it's for some people, economic disaster to get this forecast wrong.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Jessica says, the reason these forecasts were wrong was that it had stopped raining as much in the spring in Colorado.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  And so if it is super dry and warm in the spring after April, after they take that survey, it turns out that the plants wake up early.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  And it's sunny and they say, okay, I'm going to start using water to grow as a plant. They start transpiring, evaporating, and a lot of that water goes back to the atmosphere instead of in the stream.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  So the plants before it can even get to the stream, the plants near the snow are like vacuuming it up in a variety of ways.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  Is, is climate change affecting your predictions at all?

• 25:13Speaker 03

  So basically, climate change, warmer temperatures, the biggest impact is that more precipitation falls as rain instead of snow. So now in terms of predictability, rain is fast, right? When it rains, it runs off right away. So the snow pack, what it does is like, it actually allows us at this time of year and traditional April 1st snow survey to say, this is how much water is going to be in the rivers in the summer. We actually have no idea how much it's going to rain in May or June in the Western US right now. Like that, we can't forecast, right? And without the snow, it's that kind of guess of how much will it rain in the future that we have to rely on.

• 25:56Speaker 03

  So, so snow itself, by virtue of just storing the water on the hillside, gives you a lot of predictability that we don't have when it falls as rain instead of snow.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  Fascinating. All right. Easy question to end. Is there a snow that you would revisit from your life that you'd encountered?

• 26:17Speaker 03

  Yes, so I did a project. We were studying snow out in Gothic Colorado, which is sort of by Crested Butte, middle of nowhere Colorado Rockies. We were staying in this old abandoned mining town that is now a biological research station that you can only access by skiing in. So we skied in and we're staying in this old mining town. And every day we are cross-country skiing out to our measurement sites to dig in the snow and measure things. And so we're the only people out there and it's like snowing really lightly. And I was, I was the front of the line of everybody heading out, just sort of cross country skiing on our route.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  And then all of a sudden, right in front of me, I disturbed a bunch of ptarmigan that were hiding under the snow. So the ptarmigan, especially when it's really light fluffy snow, they will like bury themselves in the snow. But as I went by them, I scared them. So all of a sudden the snow erupted and a whole flock of white birds flew out of the snow right in front of me and all around me. It was like the snow erupted birds. I mean, it was beautiful.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  That's so magic.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  I keep looking online, like, has someone videotaped this? I can't find a like YouTube recording of like ptarmigan erupting from snow. If you ever find one, you have to send me.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  Okay, this is perfect. We had, we brought, we came to you with questions that people had and, and now you are leaving our audience with a question that you have, which is, does anyone have videos of a bunch of ptarmigans?

• 27:59Speaker 03

  Of ptarmigans erupting from the snow.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Well, I'll let you know if anyone sends us any.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  If you want to read more about Jessica Lundquist's research, you can find her at the University of Washington's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. This episode was produced by me, Bird Bankerton. It was edited by Joanna Solotaroff. It was also her idea to send me walking through the cold and snow. As one lovely person I spoke to put it- Make your editor come out and do some of this.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  I'll let her know. Kristin Ayala did the mixing and the sound design. Noam Hassenfeld does our music. Melissa Hirsch checks our facts. Jorge Just, Meredith Hadnot, Julia Longoria, Sally Helm, and Amy Fadulla are the fact that some macaques in Japan have been recorded making balls of snow that they roll down hills. Thanks so much to everyone who gave me their questions and their thoughts on snow. I really appreciate you all. And if you have videos of ptarmigan bursting from snow, please send them to [email protected]. If you have videos of any birds bursting from snow, honestly, or animals bursting from snow, send those along to [email protected], too, please.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  Also, I had a ton of fun producing this episode, like, sort of an irrational amount. And I was thinking I might do another episode about snakes. So if you have snake-related questions, please record a voice memo and send it to us. No question is too silly. Just tell us your name, your age, your question about snakes, and we might use it on the show. We are, in case you missed it, [email protected]. If you would like to support the show and the journalism that Vox does, we would love it if you would become a member. It is very easy to do. Just go to vox.com/members. You'll get access to all of Vox's journalism. But you'll also know that you are supporting Vox's journalism.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  And for those of you that have emailed us to let us know that you have signed up because of Unexplainable, as well as those of you who have left us a nice review on your podcast platform or shared Unexplainable episodes with people in your life, you are the feeling that you get when you cut a paper snowflake in a weird way and you aren't sure how it's going to look, and then you unfold it, and it is spectacular. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we will be back soon with another episode about everything that we don't yet know.

• 30:52Speaker 05

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• 31:36Speaker 01

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