Why snow melts earlier

Because I love skiing and winter so much I have always been a keen observer of snow behavior; from the moment it falls off the sky to the time it finally melts. It's only since I've returned to a mountain environment, after a 10 year hiatus, that I began making precise observations and taking notes.

What I found is that over the almost 3 decades I've lived in Utah, snow melts much faster in the late spring, and early summer. Today, I think I know why this happens. It's not so much because of rising global temperature as most would think, but because humans are soiling their snowfields, all over the world.

All the particulates and other pollutants that are emitted from Paris Diesel cars to Beijing Coal-fired generator plants or forest fires in the West, are eventually dropping upon our snowfields and glaciers in such amounts that just a few days after a fresh late season snowfall, the dirty deposits take over, making the remaining snow all gray and exposing the dark bare ice on glaciers.

All of this contributes to a huge loss in reflectivity of these normally white surfaces that increases the penetration of the solar heat and hasten melting. As a matter of example, the Greenland ice sheet loses its surface reflectivity from 85 percent to 30 percent according to Jason Box, founder of the Dark Snow project. A very compelling video of his research follows...