The silence after a snowstorm isn’t just your imagination — all those tiny flakes actually trap the sounds of your surroundings.
Chris Bianchi, a meteorologist at Weather Nation, described the phenomenon as a sort of citywide cup of tea: After a big storm, we can take a few minutes to relax and take in the quiet.
The science behind that quiet comes down to how sound waves travel (or, more accurately, don’t travel) through snowflakes. “Snowflakes, when they’re spaced further apart, there’s little gaps, obviously invisible to the naked human eye,” Bianchi said. “But there are these little gaps within the snow and those are very efficient at absorbing sound.”
The sound waves from cars, buildings and people get trapped in those small places between the snowflakes. Not just any snow can trap noise. It has to be the freshly fallen, light and fluf