Having lived in Southern California all my life, except for a year in Germany when we had only a few light snowballs, my experience with snow is quite limited. I’d like to know if what I saw in TV cartoons as a little kid really works. If I let a snowball go from the top of a hill, will it really get bigger and bigger? Can a typical snowball, maybe four inches in diameter, really grow to gargantuan proportions of a foot or more across?
Of course they can and they can become way bigger than a foot across. It takes some rather wet and heavy snow however. They can become the size of a small car under the right conditions. If you want to see something even weirder, check out naturally made snow donuts.
A warning for those who want to try this: on a lawn, the lowest layer of snow may be ice that is frozen around the grass. If your ball gets pick enough, you start ripping out the lawn. This is bad.
A foot across is not what I’d call gargantuan. It’s just half the size needed for the bottom of a snowman. And you probably want to start with a largeish ball in the first place. Unless the surface is very smooth, and the snow cover really thin, a hand sized snowball will stop almost imediately.
What cartoons fail to show are all the myriad ways self-increasing snowballs can fail catastrophically.
They tend not to remain spherical (in my experience) - they will tend to rotate about an axis and end up picking up an ever-widening flat layer of snow, ending up looking like a cylinder with dimpled ends.
To get actual balls of snow, human management is normally necessary - changing the axis periodically so as to built up the ball evenly all over (a bit like rolling a ball of string).
Someone rolling a snowball. They tend to collapse as they pick up speed and get too big.
This is a snow man I made last winter.
Check out the Google Search on snow wheels.
Thanks everyone. Question answered.
I’ve seen these on the side of mountainy backroads around Cedar City, UT. The usually didn’t get bigger than about a foot in diameter. When I describe them, most people look at me like I just said I saw Sasquatch with a bad case of Morgellons Disease.
I didn’t call them donuts, though. I called them Lifesaver-shaped. Maybe that helps explain the funny looks I got?
On preview: based on the low number of these things in Duckster’s Google Image search, not many other people see them, either.