'Fake snow' conspiracy theories resurge amid US winter storms

"Some ppl are getting FAKE snow from the sky," says a January 15, 2024 post that amassed thousands of interactions on X, formerly Twitter.

The video in the post was originally published December 18, 2023 on Instagram.

"This can't be Real, what's happening to this World, is the Snow even Real," the caption says.

As her daughter tries to melt a snowball with a lighter, a woman in the clip says: "It ain't even melting. What kind of snow is this?"

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Screenshot of an Instagram post taken January 19, 2024

Similar claims have swirled elsewhere on TikTok, Facebook and X.

They came as unrelenting storms battered the United States, leading to at least 50 weather-related deaths, officials and media outlets reported. Frigid temperatures, snow gales and thick ice caused fatal accidents on treacherous roadways, snarled air travel, closed schools and cut power to thousands.

Some posts claimed the snow had an unnatural texture and speculated if "someone" was "dropping styrofoam from the sky." Others claimed the snow contained chemicals.

But there is no evidence to support those allegations -- and the texture and shape of snowflakes vary depending on weather conditions (archived here). 

Chris Bianchi, a meteorologist in Denver, Colorado, told AFP on January 19 that the video shared online appears to show graupel (archived here), which consists of "supercooled" water droplets that "refreeze on a snowflake -- a process called accretion."

"Graupel is soft and easily gets broken up if you push on it," he said in a direct message on X. "It's different from (regular) snow. You can sort of think of it as snow with a slushy outer core."

Zombie claim

AFP has previously debunked conspiracy theories inspired by failed attempts to melt snow with a lighter, which have circulated online since at least 2021.

The phenomenon is attributable to the process of sublimation, in which a substance skips the liquid phase and goes straight to a gas (archived here).

"It is normal for snow not to burn," Cecilia Bitz, a professor of atmospheric sciences and geophysics at the University of Washington, told AFP in a January 19 email.

"However, snow should melt when heated above the melting point. If the snow is not melting in the video, the snow is probably very cold and simply warming up in the fire."

Scientists from the Imagination Station Toledo museum in the US state of Ohio have previously conducted the snow heating experiment, refuting claims of fake precipitation in a YouTube video published February 1, 2014 (archived here).

Educational website Science Notes also published a graphic in 2021 addressing the misinformation, noting the soot seen in some videos comes from "incomplete combustion from the fire"  (archived here).

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Screenshot of a graphic taken from Science Notes on January 19, 2024

"If it were possible to create fake snow and spread it across the country, we wouldn't be having a climate warming crisis," Bitz said. "The technology simply doesn't exist."

Over the past few decades, global warming has caused the rapid melting of glaciers and ice sheets (archived here). Increased average temperatures have also affected atmospheric and ocean circulation patterns (archived here) -- with an overall decreasing trend of snow and ice volumes in many regions.

More of AFP's reporting on environmental misinformation is available here.