As we say goodbye to winter—and not a moment too soon for those of us who have plain had enough of it—this week’s spotlight focuses on the season’s preeminent natural phenomenon: snow, or “snö” as it is in Swedish and the title of a new book by Sverker Sörlin.

Sörlin is one of the world’s most prolific, influential, and acclaimed environmental historians. Growing up in northern Sweden, where “there was snow for more than half the year,” he became intimately familiar with it. For people around him, “snow just existed, like something eternal that had to be shoveled from All Saints’ Day until Walpurgis night.”

Upper Midwesterners would easily be able to relate to that. And after the unusually cold and snowy winter parts of the US just had, with more school snow days than many parents would welcome, it might be curious to learn that, in Sörlin’s 1960s childhood, snow days didn’t exist. In one instance he admits that children from far-away villages did get the day off, but not because of snow. The temperature that day dropped to -45˚C (-49˚F), and it wasn’t safe to dispatch the bus to the regular route, but local kids from a nearby village weren’t excused from marching the two kilometers to the school building.

But Snö is more than an offering on the beauty and challenge of winter. For Sörlin, snow was never a nuisance. And as an environmental historian with an understanding of climates, frozen crystals became a source of inspiration. Ultimately, Snö is all you never knew you wanted to know about the history of the relationship between snow and humans. A densely synthetic narrative, the book educates the reader about a wide array of subjects from deep geology (did you know when the first snow fell on Earth?) to linguistics (if you wonder whether the Inuit really have a hundred words for snow or are curious to learn the etymology of “katabatic”). Snö is three perspectives rolled into one: environmental, scientific, and cultural.

The case of the vanishing snow

From the vantage point of his extensive knowledge of global environmental history and policy, Sörlin treats snow as an increasingly rare species threatened with extinction. Humans may be the cause of this loss through anthropogenic climate change, but we are also profoundly affected by its disappearance.

Solastalgia, an emotional phenomenon introduced in 2003 by the Australian social psychologist Glenn Albrecht, is a sense of loss of a very specific, environmental kind. The term is increasingly applied to Arctic peoples but has broader applications as a longing “for a particular place, the way it looked before, while at the same time experiencing awareness that the object of this longing has irrevocably lost the very qualities we seek, due to climate change and environmental degradation.”

The feeling of solastalgia has very real causes in the reduction of the Earth’s snow cover. The chapter “Cold Activism” lays out in detail the current and impending losses and their consequences for human societies. Snow comes and goes. Its patterns have changed over time and place. They have become irregular and unusual. There is no specific date on which snow began to disappear, nor is there a snow doomsday clock to count down to when it is gone completely.

Actually, this is not entirely true. Sörlin describes recent artists’ efforts to draw attention to the issue of the vanishing snow. A 2015 interdisciplinary collaboration between an Icelandic artist Olafur Elliason and Danish geologist Minik Rosing is particularly striking. In the project “Ice Watch Paris,” they brought twelve floating ice blocks from the Nuuk Fjord in Greenland to the COP21 meeting in Paris. The twelve-segment “ice clock” circle gradually melted on the Place du Panthéon, representing the futility of human approaches to solving the issue.

Still, snow can always take us by surprise. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, snow has been present pretty much anywhere in North America within the span of their observation record. That includes Southern states where a rare snowfall brings amazement and complete disruption of technological systems and human infrastructures. As an example, Sörlin mentions how in February 2022 a snowstorm incapacitated Austin, Texas.

For me, there is little need to reach back so far. In 2025, a passing snowstorm forced northern Florida into a lockdown while I was in Tallahassee, causing all services in the city, including medical offices and grocery stores, to shut down for up to two days. In 2026, we have been watching the same pattern of disrupted weather patterns unfold. Just the other day, in a record-breaking temperature plunge, the Washington, DC area went from 86˚ F “shorts” weather to a steady snowfall overnight.

Snow in history and the history of snow

The geography and time span of Sörlin’s discussion of low-temperature science is encyclopedic. Snow, known to be one of nature’s deadly weapons, has a rich history tied to human exploration. We know the heroic narratives of Arctic and Antarctic expeditions of the early 20th century.

Perhaps, a less known but quite fascinating case would be Christiane Ritter’s experiences on Svalbard, a Norwegian chain of islands on the way to the North Pole. Ritter spent the winter of 1934 in a cabin by the Arctic ocean bay with her husband. And by winter we mean a polar night. On Svalbard, the period of roaring snowstorms and almost total darkness when the sun doesn’t rise above the horizon lasts three months each year. Now there is an Arctic research center, UNIS, equipped with a safety program, at the university in Longyearbyen. But for two weeks in 1934, Ritter had the cabin and scarce supplies to survive when her husband was gone hunting. An artist and a writer, her book, A Woman in the Polar Night, describes the majestic and lethal Arctic nature.

A college seminar in the history of 19th and 20th-century science could easily center around Snö. If it were the only required reading, with students assigned to piece together a global history of glaciology, crystallography, and climatology from the text, it would be a thrilling educational experience. And if it wouldn’t make an expert of a diligent student, I’m not sure what would.

The way the book evokes connections between nature, science, politics, and art makes it tempting to go down every rabbit hole of learning more about the stories and the people. It’s not too often that one sees a mention of Jules Verne and Paul Gervais, Robert Hooke and William Scoresby, Louis Agassiz and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, or Andy Warhol and Ukichiro Nakaya on the same page.

The life and work of Nakaya (1900-1962) hold special meaning for the book. He received a degree in experimental physics from the University of Tokyo (Tokyo Imperial University at the time). As a postdoctoral researcher at King’s College London, he focused on long-wave x-rays. His ambition, however, was to do something new in physics rather than join an established research program.

After returning from London, he accepted a position in the physics department at Hokkaido University. The modestly equipped and short-staffed laboratory could offer little to an experimentalist, so he developed an interest in something there was no shortage of—snow. Hokkaido is Japan’s northernmost island with one of the snowiest climates on the planet: There was plenty for the 1972 Sapporo Winter Olympics. Four decades prior to that, Nakaya’s low temperature science lab became a glaciology research center.

Central to Nakaya’s research was the nature of the complexity and variety of snow crystals (we call them snowflakes). After spending three winters collecting samples and taking photographs on Mount Tokachi for empirical lab analysis and not much progress in his research, Nakaya pivoted his approach. In 1936, after numerous experiments with materials for the “centerpiece”—the crystallization nucleus—he created the first artificial snow crystal. In the early post-World War II years, he published Snow Crystals: Natural and Artificial, a taxonomy, a physical analysis, and a method for artificial production of snow.

A physicist’s experiments yielded a breakthrough concept: “…the structure of the snowflake carries information about the circumstances of the exact time and place in the atmosphere that it was formed.” This means that snow has rich research potential for geophysics and geography, or, in Sörlin’s words, “forms a time telescope that can focus both backwards and forwards.”

Sverker’s sense of snow

Circling back, there is a fourth vantage point in Snö that’s important to mention. It’s personal. In most cases, scholars choose to remove their individuality from written work for the sake of objectivity and conforming to academic standards. The recurring first-person narrative and the sharing of memories, travels, tastes in art, family stories, emotions and impressions woven into the history and science of Snö allows the reader to get to know the author. Meet Sverker Sörlin.

Anna Doel
American Institute of Physics
adoel@aip.org

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