There Will Be No Natural Snow at the Winter Olympics

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Number6
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There Will Be No Natural Snow at the Winter Olympics

Post by Number6 »

For the first time in the modern Olympics there will be no natural snow for the Winter Games. What the Chinese will do is artificially make snow using 49 million gallons of water using snow guns and lancets. A snow gun is a a machine with a fan that blows microscopic balls of ice and water droplets into the air to freeze and become snow. A snow lance is like a snow gun without the fan and instead uses amulti-head nozzle.
When athletes take to the slopes outside Beijing next week for the 2022 Winter Olympics, they’ll do so atop 100% man-made snow for the first time in the history of the games.

A TechnoAlpin sales manager told Sports Illustrated that the company has 170 fan-powered guns and 30 fanless snow lances at Yanqing, the alpine skiing venue; 40 guns and 15 lances at the Zhangjiakou nordic center; 62 guns and 30 lances at the freestyle park; and seven lances running in downtown Beijing for the big air event.

All of that will require an estimated 49 million gallons of water, drawn from reservoirs in a region the International Olympic Committee acknowledges already “suffers from severe water stress and ... is becoming increasingly arid.”

The water is chemically treated to resist melting, mixed with air and blasted aloft in freezing temperatures, ultimately falling to the ground as a denser, harder version of real snow.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/beijing- ... cbfa172aaf
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ZoWie
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Re: There Will Be No Natural Snow at the Winter Olympics

Post by ZoWie »

That renders a lot of records irrelevant.

IIRC, same thing happened in Russia, when they hosted the Winter Games up in the mountains near the same beach resort where Putin and his oligarch buddies had built up a huge hotel complex complete with their very own Grand Prix just like in Monaco. The Black Sea is not exactly an Arctic winter zone, so they would make or bring in fake snow at night, same way they do at the LA ski resorts. (Yes, it has them.) If the cameras ever panned away from the track, you saw bare ground.

IOC needs to talk about this.
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ProfX
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Re: There Will Be No Natural Snow at the Winter Olympics

Post by ProfX »

They coulda just called in this guy.

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