Abstract
FOLLOWING upon the remarkable ice-storm of which I wrote you last month (NATURE, February 5, p. 317), we have had a wonderful and beautiful display of the amount of snow which the branches of trees can bear. There had been the beginning of an ice-storm on Sunday last; and on Monday, the 9th instant, there followed a damp but light snow which fell rapidly in a calm atmosphere. The whole appearance of trees and air and sky was very beautiful. Some of the trees caught a large quantity of snow, fastened to the branches in a form resembling elliptical cylinders, of which the lower lines of the branches were elements. I made some measurements on the extremities of drooping branches of an elm-tree on our lower campus. One twig with a diameter of 0˙21 inch sustained a mass of snow with diameters of 2˙50 and 2˙33 inches; a second, 0˙15 inch in diameter, carried snow the diameters of which were 2˙30 and 1˙93 inches; so that the area of the cross-sections of this snow was not far from 120 and 153 times that of the twigs which supported it. Two other measurements were still more remarkable. In one the twig was one-tenth of an inch in diameter, and the mass of snow had diameters of 2˙40 and 1˙75 inches, making the area of the sections 420 times that of the wood; and in the other, a twig 0˙11 inch in diameter, carried snow with diameters of 2˙50 and 2˙05 inches, so that the area of the sections of the snow was 424 times that of the wood. The snow was so loosely attached to the branches that it seemed impossible to make accurate measurements of the weight of the twigs and of the snow which was piled up on them; but the ratio of the weights was, of course, by no means equal to the ratio of the sections—which was practically that of the bulks—of the wood and the snow.
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HART, S. Snow on the Branches of Trees. Nature 43, 391 (1891). https://doi.org/10.1038/043391a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/043391a0
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