Black Snow

jenna: 3rd Apr 2006 - 14:59 GMT

I always though that it was, what was enclosed the snow that appeared after the winter to be the worse part... trash everywhere. Wow can't believe that PQ still has snow banks... we lost those in TO months ago.

yehovahyireh : 3rd Apr 2006 - 16:12 GMT

Wow. I've never seen snow get that way before. I mean, I've seen it get dirty, you know, when it starts to melt and whatnot. But, wow, that's truly amazing. It looks like piles and piles of tar.

EvilGentleman: 5th Apr 2006 - 08:08 GMT

Actually, I think the blackness of the snow depends on the quality of the pavement it was scraped off of, among other factors. This is the parking lot of the office building complex where my wife works. The road that this parking lot exits onto has a shortcut to the nearby McDonald's that is not paved, so I think that a lot of the workers here tracked a lot of mud back into the parking lot that was stuck in the treads of their tires. This in turn gets scraped up by the snowplows and piled into the giant piles they leave along the back of the parking lot.

On top of that, the surface of the parking lot is not 100% smooth, since a small amount of asphalt seems to crumble away every time the plow scrapes over it. So yehovahyireh's description of "piles of tar" may actually be partly true.

And jenna, most of our snowbanks here are long gone, too. There is no snow whatsoever near my home, but these snow piles in the pictures started off at 20 feet high, and have melted down to 7 or 8 feet. There was a huge amount of snow in these piles a month ago, but this is the last 25 or 30% that is left, and the black crud acts as an insulator, slowing the melting process. Ah, the science of parking lot crud... ;-)