Five facts you never knew about snow

February 5th, 2009 by Graham

Snow house
It seems that I spoke too soon. Oxford, home of Fabiola & Sing Sing, wasn’t hit hard earlier this week by the flurries of snow that struck much of the rest of the UK, and yesterday there was barely a speck of snow left on the ground.

Well, that’s all changed overnight and we’re now well and truly covered with the stuff – it looks gorgeous.

While I’m defrosting the car, there’s just time to share with you five things you may never have known (and, most likely, never worried that you didn’t know) about snow.

1. It is an urban legend that Eskimos have more than 100 words for “snow”. But if you’re interested, here is an amusing fake list of 100 Eskimo words for that gravity-challenged cold white stuff.

2. The top speed of an average snowflake is 1.7 metres per second. That’s 5 foot 7 inches in real money. Or, if you prefer, 1.06 Tom Cruises.

3. Enough snow fell in the UK on Monday for everybody to make 251,800 snowballs… each. That’s the calculation of maths wizard Carol Vorderman, who reckons that Britain saw a mind-boggling 3,840 billion kilograms of snow on 2 February.

4. The Guinness Book of World Records says that the world’s largest snowflake was measured at 38cm wide and 20cm thick. It was in the USA (of course) that this monster snowflake was witnessed, with some observers in Montana in 1887 describing it as “larger than a milk pan”.

5. Chionophobia is a fear of snow. Other lesser known phobias include Epistaxiophobia (fear of nose bleeds), Metrophobia (fear of poetry) and Sesquipedalophobia (fear of long words.. which must be upsetting when you hear the diagnosis from the doctor).