5. Really weird question, but why is snow white? I mean why isn’t it a different color because when water freezes its clear and still kind of the color of water so why isn’t snow like that?

Sidney,

I love the question of why snow is white and the follow-on question of why ice is blue.

You are right that a single ice crystal is basically clear.

Snow is white because you take a lot of ice grains that don’t absorb light very well and light is able to reflect off the grain edges. All colors – wavelengths – of light then bounce back to your eye in about even amounts – so you see white.

With ice, there are not as many opportunities to reflect off the grain edges because the air has been squished out. So the light travels farther through the ice before being reflected back out. Ice absorbs red light about 100x better than blue light. So the light that comes back out of ice, is missing red so you see blue.

T.J.