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.
[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
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.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8993287
[/QUOTE]
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.