Sno: and history Sverker Sörlin Doubleday (2025)
As a child growing up in northern Sweden, environmental historian Sverker Sørlin fell in love with snow. “I can see the light outside even before I open the blinds. Snow! The miracle of whiteness shining through the slats,” he recalls in his latest book. Snow.
Now he's fighting for snow survival. And it must survive, Serlin argues, if we want to avoid droughts, flooding of tundra fields and overheated planet. With surprising anecdotes, emotional memoirs and calls to action to combat climate change. Snow designed to activate readers.
Glaciers are more than just blocks of ice: plans to save them must not lose sight of their hidden lives.
A ski trip to Norway's Rondane Mountains was a standout moment for Sørlin. After sunset, dozens of puddles began to freeze in the grass around his camp, each making a distinct cracking sound. Surlin felt at one with “the forces of nature, of the entire solar system, acting in a compressed time frame.”
Snow's distinctive soundscapes are mesmerizing. For example, when a microbiologist Emmanuel Charpentier Arriving in eastern Sweden to study the gene-editing technology CRISPR, for which she won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, she heard the snow crunch under her feet and whisper “crispr, Crispr.”
And contrary to myth, our voices are nowhere near loud enough to trigger an avalanche. At a pressure of 20 pascals, not even the sound of a jet plane taking off will cause a snow slide, and a human scream is only one tenth of this pressure. In contrast, a sonic boom produces 200 pascals of power, which can certainly move some snow. Despite this evidence, Surlin still wonders: “If I were standing there in the powdery snow again…would I dare to scream?”
A flurry of research
Surlin celebrates the people who searched for answers to the scientific mysteries of snow.
In northern Japan in the 1930s, a physicist Ukichiro Nakaya conducted field research in the mountains of Hokkaido, which are notorious for their severe snowstorms. In the disastrous climate, Nakaya became obsessed with explaining the diversity of snow crystals. By creating individual snowflakes on rabbit hairs in a low-temperature laboratory, Nakaya was able to evaluate the effects of temperature and humidity on the shape of the crystals. Each of these “letters from heaven” contained important information about the atmospheric conditions in which they formed.
Children enjoying a snowy day in Kabul.Photo: MP Kokhsar/AFP/Getty
Other snow-obsessed characters include Willy Dansgaard, “a sharp young physicist with broad interests and an insatiable curiosity” who, starting in the 1960s, worked with ice cores drilled into the Greenland ice sheet. In the ice cores, Dansgaard's team found snow dating back millennia, preserving what Sørlin calls “atmospheric markings… a kind of microscopic message in a bottle.”
Climate change reveals the secrets of our ancestors hidden in the ice
The chemistry of Greenland's ice core revealed sudden changes in climate, linked to Dansgaard's interest in why Norse communities abandoned the island in the Middle Ages. Research suggests that an arid climate caused the extinction of the Norwegians in the fifteenth century because there was less grass for livestock in winter (B. Zhao and other sciences. Advertising. 8eabm4346; 2022).
