Fact check: Sublimation, not government conspiracy, explains snowmelt videos

The claim: Possibly manufactured snow won’t melt

Is there something amiss with the snow? A Facebook claim questions whether a snow-like substance that does not seem to melt when exposed to heat is real.

The Feb. 17 post is a repost of three TikTok videos: “Need some explaining…” by user doubleday24, “Anyone played with the government generated snow yet?” by user erickzilli and a final video by user reginaldsutton8 that claims snow from the storm that wreaked havoc in Texas in mid-February will not melt.

The caption asks what’s “wrong wit the snow?!!!!??”

USA TODAY reached out to the poster for comment.

Each video presents a different scenario with a similar theme: The “snow” refuses to turn to water.

In “Need some explaining…” a split-screen video shows two people — one wearing a pink shirt, the other sporting a baseball cap with a snarling bulldog patch on front — applying heat to a snowball with a common cigarette lighter.

“I’m going to show y’all right now how I know we’re in a simulator,” the cap-wearer says.

As the person in pink scoops snow from the ground, compacts it into a ball and holds a flame against it, the cap-wearer copies the actions in real time with narration.

“You’re going to try to melt the snow. Try to melt it, it’s not gonna melt,” the cap-wearer says as the snowball appears to blacken under the heat. “This is just crazy.” 

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Snow collected by user reginaldsutton8 stays frozen, despite efforts to melt it in a microwave or on a stove top.

“So, it’s snowing in Texas. Man, I don’t know what’s going on, but I put snow in some bowls, stuck it in the microwave and it almost blew the microwave up,” the user claimed. “It was sparking like it had metal in it. I got it on the stove; it’s not melting. I put it in the oven, and all it is, it’s getting hard, like a rock.”

The strange occurrence was enough for reginaldsutton8 to suspect government intervention.

“Someone tell me what’s going on. Is it the government doing something crazy? Please tell me,” he says.

USA TODAY reached out to reginaldsutton8 for comment.

The last video, “Anyone played with the government generated snow yet?” shows someone at an undisclosed location picking up handfuls of snow.

“So, I went outside and I had a look at the snow and … it didn’t really seem like it was snow,” a narrator says, bringing the snow closer to the camera for inspection. “It seemed like it was something made in a lab.”

USA TODAY could not locate the original posters of the other videos to seek comment.

It is doubtful that the videos are irrefutable evidence of simulated snowfall, according to experts. One even illustrates a common scientific phenomenon.

Sublimation

Video “evidence” of a mysterious snow-like substance that doesn’t melt under flame has circulated around the internet for years. The claims date back to at least 2014, when conditions in Atlanta following a snowstorm were compared to scenes from a “zombie apocalypse,” according to Atlanta magazine.

Slate magazine also addressed the conspiracy theories in a 2014 article. Phil Plait, writer for Slate’s Bad Astronomy blog, recorded a replication of the snowball experiment and posted it to Bad Astronmy’s YouTube page. Sure enough, the snow did not melt right away.

“To summarize, two things happen: One is that as the snow melts, the remaining snow absorbs the water. That’s why it doesn’t appear to drip; the snowball becomes a slushball,” Plait wrote.

The process is called “sublimation,” according to Mike Stone, a meteorologist for WTVR News in Richmond, Virginia. When heavy snowfall fell in Virginia’s capital back in 2014, the station performed its own test and posted it to YouTube.

“When you heat something like this, it goes from a solid to a gas. It’s called sublimation,” Stone told then-colleague Alix Bryan when her snowball failed to melt. “This is actually disappearing by going into vapor.”

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Dr. Tandy Grubbs, professor and chair of the department of chemistry and biochemistry at Stetson University, told USA TODAY that given time, the snowball would have melted.

“Firstly, I would note that the demonstrator did not hold the lighter under the snowball long enough to melt enough of the snow to potentially see water formation (and dripping),” he wrote in an email. 

Grubbs also explained why the snowball turned black where the flame touched it.

“The formation of black on the snow when the lighter is held under it is due to the incomplete combustion and formation of soot when the lighter fuel is burning,” he wrote.  “Soot would ordinarily not be visible when a lighter is burning in open air, but the snowball in this case is acting like a filter, catching and accumulating the black soot particles, which show up quite visibly on the white snow after a few seconds of exposure.”

Sublimation demos are some of the outrageous claims about synthetic snow posted to the internet in recent years. Some blamed “chemtrails” sprayed by passing airplanes for the snow that gridlocked Atlanta seven years ago, while others pointed to nanobots, according to a 2014 Yahoo! News article. The latter does not yet exist, per a Dec. 30 GlobeNewswire press release about a major nanorobotics report.

“Even if the government was perpetrating such a diabolical scheme (they aren’t), and was able to cover it up and keep people quiet (no need because it isn’t happening), it just wouldn’t work. It would be the most inefficient and ineffective way of dosing the population with anything,” Scott Sutherland of Yahoo! News wrote.

Our rating: False

We rate this claim FALSE, based on our research. A claim containing TikTok videos that purport to illustrate snow that won’t melt is based on unproven and previously debunked conspiracy theories. A snowball will melt under a flame, turning from a solid to a gas due to a process called sublimation. Other claims tying snowfall to chemtrails or nanobot technology are unfounded, according to experts.

Our fact-check sources:

• USA TODAY, Feb. 18: “‘Just a real mess’: 100M from the South to the East Coast in path of a new winter storm; 2.1M power outages across 8 states”
• Atlanta magazine, Jan. 31, 2014: “Snow and walkers: A tale of two Atlanta apocalypses”
• Slate, Feb. 3, 2014: “Atlanta Storm Was a Government Conspiracy? Snow Way!”
• GlobeNewswire, Dec. 30, 2020: “Nanorobotics: Technologies and Global Markets”
• Yahoo! News, Feb. 5, 2014: “Chemtrails? Nanobots? Please. What fell in Atlanta was real snow that actually did melt”
• The Bad Astronomer YouTube, Feb. 3, 2014: “Snow that doesn’t melt! Is it a government conspiracy?! (Hint: no.)”
• WTVR CBS 6 YouTube, Jan. 30, 2014: “‘Fake snow’ explained: It’s called sublimation”
• Feb. 19 Conversation with Dr. Tandy Grubbs

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