Abstract
According to Snowflake Bentley (a historic Vermonter from Jericho, who looked at thousands of snowflakes throughout his lifetime), all snowflakes have different designs which makes them unique. Snow is the primary form of precipitation below 32 degrees Fahrenheit. On my hill during the early spring, the snow almost always melts at different rates. After I seeing that I have always wondered why the snow melts at different rates. In this experiment we are trying to figure out what qualities (icy snow, older snow, newly fallen snow, pack or powder, a lot of snow) will make the snow melt faster.
In December we took samples of natural snow from outside my house. We put it into two different categories of powder and packed which had been packed like a snow ball using gloves. With a hairdryer we melted the snow and recorded the time it took to melt the snow until it was entirely water. We also recorder the texture and the time since the snow had fallen.
Our results showed that our hypothesis was partially correct. We thought that older and icy snow would take longer to melt. Therefore, we thought that newly fallen snow that is light and fluffy would melt fastest. While testing we realized that packed snow took a shorter amount of time to melt then light and fluffy snow. This was probably because the molecules are tighter together in packed snow so when a few molecules where warmed up the others also warm up faster do to how close together they are than powdery snow. Also, powdered snow is spaced out more and it takes longer for the hot air to reach some parts. If I were to do a follow up experiment I would do an experiment to see if having more snow in the bowl made it take longer to melt. In this experiment we were able to find the answer of our question and have fun while doing it.
