Silent Night - or - Do you want to build a snowman?

This was the view from Wigton this morning. Wigton is very quiet compared to the constant noise of traffic I was used to in the city but you can still hear the hum of the factory in the night if you tune in to it. Not last night - it was very, very quiet. The snow that fell was incredibly dry and powdery.It was very good at absorbing the sound energy. Sound is a longitudinal vibration. The sound would penetrate the snow instead of being reflected and this has a damping effect. The sound would make the loose snow flakes vibrate a little bit but the likelihood is that they would be bad at re-transmitting that vibration to the air. The energy would thus likely be dissipated as tiny molecular vibrations - in other words as microscopically small amounts of thermal energy. Not enough to melt the snow. To test the properties of the snow, we built a snowman. The extreme powdery nature of the snow made it hard for it to stand up...