Why is snow white?
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What colors do you see shining on snow in the sun?
What about...?
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Transcript
Why does snow look so white when ice can look clear?
Snow is made of lots of tiny ice pieces. Each piece has little sides and spaces around it.
Light from the Sun bounces around on all those tiny sides. It bounces red, blue, yellow, and every color.
All the colors come back to our eyes mixed together. Mixed-up colors look white, so snow looks white!
So that's why snow is white. Its tiny ice pieces mix up sunlight's colors!
For grown-ups: the science
Snow looks white because its many tiny ice pieces bounce all the colors of sunlight back together.
Individual ice crystals are mostly transparent. In a snowpack, light repeatedly reflects and refracts at the many ice-air surfaces between crystals, scattering visible wavelengths broadly; the combined light reaching the eye appears white. Snow can look blue in deep shadows or thick layers because longer light paths preferentially remove more red light.