Littell's Living Age/Volume 170/Issue 2201/The "Binding" Effect in Snow

The "binding" effect of intense cold and a fierce wind on snow is remarkably illustrated by a photograph, in Science, of a large mass of snow formed on one side of a telegraph pole (at the top) near the summit of Mount Washington. Lieutenant Schwatka notes this in relation to the building of snow houses by the Eskimo. While the cohesion of snow in our latitudes (and the early Arctic snow) is of a plastic, wet, or "pasty" nature, the snow used in building, packed by high wind and cold, is dry and almost stone-like. Cutting a thin portion gives a shower of fine powder as from loaf-sugar. Blocks of this snow ring like a well-burnt brick, or a bar of suspended steel struck with the hand. Lieutenant Schwatka remembers a block rolling down hill fifteen or twenty feet, and says: "I doubt if a rolling guitar would have given forth many more confused musical tones than the bumping block as it struck and bounded down the hard stone-like bank of snow." The least quantity of ice in the snow, however, makes it more or less worthless for building. To produce this snow, it may not be necessary that the wind and the low temperature have occurred together, but both must have happened before the Eskimo will use the snow for building.