Snow just wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t white. One of the reasons people love snow is because it coats everything in white, making everything seem so pure and clean. Many people even refer to snow as the ‘white stuff.’ But it does seem odd that snow would be white. After all, if snow is simply frozen water, it would make sense for snow to be clear.
To understand why snow is white, it is important to understand why the human eye sees color in the first place. Visible light is made up of many different vibrational frequencies. Each color that your eye sees is on a slightly different frequency. Different objects have different colors because the particles that make up the object have different frequencies. The object will absorb certain colors of light but not others, and this is determined by the frequency of the object. It is the colors that are not absorbed that are seen by the human eye.
To illustrate this, think of a blade of grass. You see it as green, but only because it is absorbing all other colors of light. The reflected color is the color that you see. In this case, green. The other colors of light are absorbed by the blade of grass and emitted as heat (usually).
However, when it comes to the color of snow, a question still remains. If snow is frozen water, and water is clear, why is snow white? The answer to this lies in the nature of ice. If you pick up an ice cube, you will notice that you cannot see completely through the ice. It is not transparent, but rather translucent.
This means that light does not pass through the ice in a straight line. The light is bent because the distances between the atoms in an ice cube aren’t necessarily the same. Some of these distances are even close to the height of light wavelengths. This causes the photons to interact with some parts of the ice cube and not others. There the light’s path is altered, causing it to exit the ice in a different direction than it originally entered.
Snow is like a whole bunch of very tiny ice cubes all bundled together at different angles, forming ice crystals. When light first enters snow, it bounces through the first ice crystal it encounters, changes direction slightly, and moves on to the next ice crystal. The light is bounced around from crystal to crystal until it finally emerges from the snow.
However, unlike the blade of grass, which absorbed all colors of light but green, snow absorbs all colors simultaneously. When the wavelength of light emerges from the snow, it is relatively intact, meaning it still contains all colors. When all colors of light within the visible spectrum are combined, they form white light. Therefore, the human eye sees the snow as white.
Ultimately, snow is white because it reflects ‘white’ light. This reflection is also responsible for the snow’s glittering effects on a bright winter day, which gives snow an almost magical quality.
