Conspiracy Theorists Are Burning Snow to Prove It’s Fake

Conspiracy Theorists Are Burning Snow to Prove It’s Fake:

• Some people are lighting snowballs on fire because they think snow is fake.
• This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s just a common scientific process called sublimation.
• The“triple point” is where all three phases of a substance can all exist.

Unprecedented winter storms in southern states have made those most affected by the weather pretty tense over

the last week. But we can’t say we saw this one coming: New viral videos show TikTok users holding lighters to snowballs

to stoke conspiracy theories about“fake snow” they say has been seeded by—wait for it—global environmental

philanthropist and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates.

 

In the videos, people hold open flames from lighters and other implements directly up to hardpacked snowballs.

The snowballs don’t appear to melt, but instead, they burn. “No water, no dripping, no nothing,” says one

woman, who believes there’s metal inside the snow, and that Gates is somehow to blame. (Warning: This video

contains explicit language—and Popular Mechanics certainly doesn’t condone using the term in this tweet to

describe the good people of Texas.)

So what’s really happening here? The truth isn’t something sinister—it’s just science. The fire is causing the frozen

mass of snow to sublimate straight into water vapor, not liquid water. Sublimation is when a solid skips the liquid

phase and goes directly to gas. (The opposite happens, too, like when your breath freezes and shatters on the coldest days.

Sublimation is what gives dry ice its patented hazy, theatrical flair. Carbon is very difficult to push into a liquid

form and much more easily goes directly from frozen to vapor. Freeze-dried (“astronaut”) food is also the result of water sublimation.

Snow turns directly to vapor instead of melting because every substance has a triple point, which is just what it

sounds like: the temperature at which all three states of matter for that substance can all exist. Water’s triple

point is so ubiquitous that, along with some other triple points of common compounds, it’s used to define certain measurements. The triple point is a shade over 32 degrees Fahrenheit under the right pressure:

That means a lot of ice is at this temperature and pressure every year. And you’ve probably seen this at work, like

when snow disappears even though the temperature hasn’t warmed to a point when the snow would melt, for example.

In a 2018 study, scientists from the University of Amsterdam found that snow evaporates—or sublimes—just as

quickly as liquid water in the right conditions. When the scientists studied the sublimation of small ice drops and

snowflakes, they found that“under the same conditions, the sublimation of a frozen ice droplet happens just as

quickly as the evaporation of the same drop when it is composed of liquid water.”

Why are people so eager to believe snow is fake? The idea of“weather control” has laced through conspiracy

circles for decades, like so-called “chemtrails” and seeded rain clouds. In this case, conspiracy theorists might

believe increased snowfall indicates something about climate change, which they say is part of a global agenda

to push government restrictions onto residents.

Bill Gates is many things—billionaire, philanthropist, synthetic beef advocate—but conspiracy theorists think he

and the Chinese government might both benefit from a world where people are blanketed by pretend snow.

You’d just think if someone could seed clouds and control the weather, they’d use real snow instead of some

kind of slush that has metal in it.