There’s an art form that is tragically underappreciated and in need of preservation. Snowmen, and snow-women and animals. We build them, we photograph them (maybe) but are resigned to their eventual disappearance. Shouldn’t there be some way of keeping and displaying some of the more remarkable examples of this often beautiful and uplifting folk-art? Of course! A snowman museum!
But, you ask, isn’t there more to it than just keeping the temperature in the museum below freezing? You know how ice cubes shrink over time sitting in your freezer. It’s a process called - well I forget what it’s called, but it’s something about water that makes it transmogrify from a solid to a gas without going through a liquid phase. Science at its most unfair!
So can one of you physics types address this problem and come up with a way of keeping frozen water crystals from dissipating on a long-term basis? Preferably without having to keep the room at absolute zero. We want visitors to be able to walk around and really appreciate the artistry. Maybe there’s a way to stablilize the air so it doesn’t suck up the snow molecules.
Hey, I did the hard part here, now someone else can iron out the deets. Imagine seeing snow angels from the Middle Ages! Yes, it’s too late for that, but wouldn’t people a hundred years from now marvel at say a snow Dolly Parton!
In case you are wondering what inspired this notion, well wonder no more.
Driving home over Bexley Rd. in Roslindale MA, I encountered this - “creation” - and just had to stop and snap a photograph. It is a big heap of snow, plowed off the street, and turned into something both fearsome and beautiful. If you want to see it, better get out soon because we’re expecting rain and rising temperatures tomorrow.
I appreciate the notion of making a casting and putting that on display - if such a thing is possible - but I fear it would be a poor substitute for the real thing. Give it a name if you like.
A fairly straightforward way to at least significantly slow down the sublimation of snow would be a room with:
A air temperature which is consistently kept at or slightly below 0 F
A high relative humidity (ideally close to 100%; in other words, the dew point of the air in your room should be at or near the air temperature)
Reasonably still air
No direct sunlight, at a minimum; LED lighting (as opposed to incandescent lighting) would be good, and relatively dim/low lighting (with no light fixtures directly illuminating your snowmen) may also help a bit.
I would think having high humidity in a room that cold world lead to frost forming on things, so instead of shrinking the snow-things would get crusted over. Right or wrong?
Zero fahrenheit is pretty cold, but we could pass out earmuffs that would also double as descriptive audio providers with historical facts for educational purpose.
Wrong (probably, I think). Frost could form on surfaces, but really only if the relative humidity gets to 100% (i.e., the air is saturated with water, and the dew point reaches 100%). Frost is really just dew, at a lower temperature. When you get frost on things in your freezer, it’s because you keep opening the freezer door (and the door isn’t airtight), and warmer, damper air keeps entering.
The reason you want high relative humidity in this thought experiment is that, if the air is nearly saturated with water, it slows down sublimation, since there’s no place for more water vapor to go.
Colder air can hold less water than warmer air; air that’s a few degrees below zero F can hold very little water vapor, and “100% relative humidity” at that temperature is still very dry in the absolute. (BTW, this is why indoor air in the wintertime in cold climates is so dry, unless you have a humidifier running; if you bring in outside air that’s at 0F, and heat it up, you’ll get warm, but very dry, air.)
Climate control would be vital for your imaginary snowman museum, and you would probably want your snowmen to be in sealed, climate-controlled cases, to maintain that perfect temperature and humidity, and keep your visitors’ body warmth and exhaled water vapor from messing things up.
Only imaginary until we whomp up a Kickstarter.
Who wants to be in on the ground floor? Yes, for starters there should be a “proof of concept”. I will put a snowball in a deep-freezer and see what happens.
I once saw what I called “The World’s Laziest Snowman” – meaning that the makers of the snowman were lazy, not the snowman himself. It was on a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts over twen ty years ago. The DPW had, of course, piled up the snow fro the street and people had shoveled the walks, leaving big piles of snow on each side of the street.
Someone took a can of black spray paint and painted a snowman onto one of the snow banks, eyes, mouth, buttons, hat, and all.
I snapped a picture of it, and we used it as the image on that year’s Christmas card.
Would a different environment other than air impact sublimation? Some other gas that inhibits sublimation of water? A different atmospheric density or pressure (that doesn’t impact the structure and stability of the snowman)?
The only thing needed is a sufficiently high relative humidity. Perpetual cold fog would work.
Other atmosphere mixes wouldn’t help, since you still need to increase the partial pressure of water vapor to prevent sublimation. It’s not like there’s a miraculous gas into which water vapor won’t mix.
If you can attain the saturation vapor pressure for water vapor (which is strictly dependent on temperature), sublimation won’t occur. Or more accurately, sublimation will occur in equilibrium, so your snow will gain water molecules back at the same rate at which it loses them. By and large, the same thing, although in the extremely long run the sculptures may subtly change shape.
What if you moved the snowman to one of the moons of Saturn? The one with the underground ocean. Not really an ideal place for a museum obviously, but it might be inhabitable in the far-off future, so I hear. Yes, as far as Earth goes they would probably have to be kept in a glass case with controlled humidity and this and that - no worse than the Mona Lisa I suppose.
But the thing about sand castles and snowmen being ephemeral, and that being what’s good about them -no, can’t accept that. That’s what keeps them on a lower level of art, yet masterpieces in both media have existed which we refuse to acknowledge, because we stubbornly insist their impermanence makes them unimportant.
But I draw the line at butter sculpture. Rancidness.
I certainly don’t dismiss the photograph as an important step in the preservation of snowmen. Any diligent search of archives both online and tucked away in old libraries can find a lot of nineteenth century examples. This one looks to have been built of snow bricks, and is standing on two legs which you don’t much see nowadays. The outstretched arms may have sticks in them to keep them from collapsing but I don’t think the rules of snow archtecture would necessarily call that cheating. If so, what then is a carrot for a nose? The makers of this icy giant would never stoop to that. In size and posture it even looks like the Wicker Man of cinematic fame.
The piece below it mentions a snowman historian named Bob Eckstein who has “dug up” many references going back millennia to snow figures built by our ancestors inhabiting Northern climates. It may seem like a lonely road to travel, but history has always depended on the outliers to guide us down the unexplored paths.
