What’s the difference between ice and snow? Aren’t they both frozen water?
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It’s the difference between glass and sand. Both are the same thing: take some glad, smash and grind it and it’ll eventually become sand. Sand you grab from the beach or desert generally has more than just sand in it (and technically not all saved is silica sand, which is what makes glass) but generally if you melt it and let it cool, you’ll get a single sheet of glass. See sand is just a bunch of really small pieces of glass, glass is a single piece.
Same thing with snow and ice. Snow is really a bunch of small pieces of ice all clumped together. And that’s one difference, small ice pieces tend to clump together and stick to reach other (see shaved ice as an example a bit less fine than snow, but not as large as crushed ice cubes). Snow can melt and then refreeze, and then it becomes a thin ice sheet. This is why roads can get ice after snow: it’s just refrozen snow.
Now the more interesting question: what is the difference between shaved ice and snow? And for that case between a sherbet (ice cream that uses only water) and snow? The answer is about how the water is frozen into small pieces. In shaved ice you break off very fine and small pieces of ice to form it. In a sherbet you keep moving the water very quickly as it freezes, so as small pieces freeze, you keep moving then around to prevent them from freezing into larger pieces, instead you get a bunch of small pieces of ice together. In snow what happens is that water in the air is very far apart, it’s a mist, and so the pieces of ice frozen are very small, she they clump as they fall down.
Now maybe you’re asking yourself: what if after the snow clumps it melts and refreezes a little? Wouldn’t that mean we get a piece of solid ice? And yes that does happen! Sometimes when the snow falls it melts into a rain drop, then an air current is able to move it up, where it refreezes, but being a drop it freezes into a ball of ice. We call this hail. Generally the hail will grab on more ice as it falls, and sometimes it can melt again into a bigger drop, then be refrozen into even bigger hail, she keep doing this until the hail is so big it doesn’t all melt and it falls into the ground, and this is how you get softball sized hail.
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