On Snow
by Deb Chachra
A few years ago, @PennyRed asked me, as a materials scientist, how snow behaves in quantity, and she got an answer from me as someone who grew up near the Canadian Shield, lives in New England, and spends time in the mountains.
But of course, snow in quantity is unstoppable. Here are three different timescales: Seconds to minutes: The aforementioned avalanches--I climbed Mount Washington in NH one winter on what turned out to be the day after a major snowfall. We went out with a guide, and there was a non-negligible avalanche risk, and he taught us how to do a 3nowpit test (because avalanches are terrifying). At the other end of the spectrum--I moved to Seattle in August, and I went for my first hike in the Cascades that month. When I got to near the highest part of my chosen trail, I was shocked to see snow underfoot--it turns out that in the West the mountains are high enough that they still have snow in August, and occasionally you get avalanches that dump snow lower down.
Hours to days: Having been in Boston through the record-breaking winter of 2015 (we got something like eight feet of snow in a month or two) I say this with feeling: snow can paralyse a city. There is a nice metaphor with work slowdowns and strikes, I think--modest snowfall just slows everything down, but the big snowstorms we got that year literally shut down the city--the subway stopped running, the highways were open for emergency travel only, and everyone just stayed home on those days.
Years to, well, geological time: Glaciers are just snow compacted into a solid mass and of course, nothing can really stand in the way of glaciers--the Canadian Shield, north of where I grew up and where my family had a cottage, once consisted of mountains higher than Everest and chains of volcanoes. And then the Ice Age came and glaciers abraded them down to bare granite.
So yeah, I can only conclude that people who use 'special snowflake' as an insult have basically zero understanding of what snow can do in quantity--from avalanches to shutting down cities to grinding volcanoes into dust.
This is why I find ‘special snowflake’, as an insult, to be risible. Individually, snowflakes are beautiful and unique, fragile and ephemeral. And *collectively*, snowflakes are unstoppable: they halt armies and grind volcanic peaks to dust.