The World’s Largest Snowflake And Other Interesting Snow Facts

1. What is the world’s largest snowflake?

Individual snowflakes, as you may have noticed, are typically quite small, but occasionally, they stick together, forming much larger snowflakes. Eggheads refer to these as aggregate snowflakes. While it’s common to experience sizable snowflakes around 3-5 centimeters in diameter, January 28th, 1887, marked an extraordinary event at the army base of Fort Keogh, Montana, US. The soldiers guarding Fort Keogh witnessed a truly bizarre sight when a snowflake the size of a dinner plate fell from the sky! In Finland, kids often try to catch flakes with their tongues, but with a snowflake this size, you’d need the tongue of an elephant!

This giant flake was reportedly up to 38 cm wide and 20 cm thick. The only snowflake in Europe that comes even close is the one found in Berlin on January 10th, 1915, and that was only 10 centimeters wide. We’ve seen some big snowflakes here at Apukka Resort, but we’re still waiting for the one that puts us in the Guinness Book of World Records!

Want to have some fun in the snow yourself?

If all this talk about snowflakes has ignited a desire within you to have a little fun in the snow, we’ve gathered below some of our favorite snowy activities available at Apukka Resort, located in the beautiful wintry world of Rovaniemi in Lapland, Finland. Explore them and discover the joy of winter like never before!

2. Why doesn’t less sunlight automatically mean more darkness?

Before the first snow falls in November, it is usually quite dark here in the North. It feels like all the little amounts of light we get are absorbed by the rainy roads and forests. It is dark, really dark, even during the day, and it’s not even the polar night yet. The coming of snow changes everything. Enter the albedo effect. Albedo, an important concept in climatology, is “the measure of diffusive reflection of solar radiation out of the total solar radiation received by a body.” And by body, we mean the Earth’s surface here. In plain English, we are talking about the amount of light that reflects back to the sky when it hits the ground. And when the snow reflects the sun’s light back to the atmosphere, it is called the snow albedo.

Snow always increases the overall brightness, even though snow albedo is highly variable. Clean, white, fresh snow reflects around 80-95% of the light that hits the Earth’s surface, almost doubling the amount of light we observe. If you’ve visited Lapland before and after the snow has arrived, you know the difference a little snow can make!