【中级听力】（文末附视频）中国人又创世界纪录 How High Can We Build with Snow?

How High Can We Build with Snow?

《文 末 附 视 频》

This may not be a word-for-word transcript.

Hey there! Welcome to Life Noggin!

I’ve always found it interesting that snow, which is literally frozen water, is such a great insulator that structures made of it can keep you warm. How cool is that? Some people have taken this to the extreme and have used snow and ice to build hotels, palaces, and entire snow cities. It seems like snow can be made into anything, but is there a limit to its construction ability?

Each year, cities all around the world throw ice and snow festivals where sculpture artists create amazing constructions out of…well, out of ice and snow, obviously. One of them, held in China’s city of Harbin near Siberia, is where two world records have been set. The first was made in 2007 when 600 participants teamed up to create the world’s largest snow sculpture. Using over 3,000 cubic meters of snow, their creation, named Romantic Feelings, is 35 meters high and 200 meters wide. Then, in 2018, a team of students and professors built the world’s largest ice shell – a hollow, 31-meter tall tower with a wall thickness of 25 centimeters. But this structure was only achieved by adding wood fibers to the ice to make it stronger. 

The material, called pykrete, was created during World War II after a man named Geoffrey Pyke proposed a plan to build an aircraft carrier out of ice. While the carrier was never built, the material was found to be much stronger than ice and even somewhat bulletproof. Because of pykrete’s strength, it’s possible to build large structures with thin walls of ice.

Snow, on the other hand, is a lot harder to fashion into complicated shapes. There’s a couple of reasons(美式口语用法：there is + plural) for that. First of all, its consistency needs to be just right. Have you ever tried to make a snowball but it wouldn’t stay together? That’s because the snow was too dry. It needs enough moisture to stick together, but not too much where it becomes slushy. This sweet spot is around 0 degrees Celsius, where the snow forms that classic snowflake shape, called dendrites, with branches that can hold onto water. The other problem is pressure caused by the weight of the snow structure. When snow experiences high pressures, it’s forced to recrystallize and eventually compress into ice – which is how glaciers form. This makes it hard to make a large structure purely out of snow without becoming icy.

But one thing you wouldn’t have to worry about with a large snow structure is melting. The Sun is only able to melt the snow on the surface, so huge, densely-packed snow piles can take a while to melt. This comes in handy when you want to keep your snowperson intact. In fact, the world’s tallest snowperson, reaching 37 meters, took a month to build and is absolutely terrifying. This beautiful monstrosity has truck tires for buttons and 9-meter-long pine trees for arms. Her name is Olympia and she haunts my nightmares. 

So go out there and try to build the world’s tallest snow structure if you can! I believe in you! I would say make a snow Blocko, but that seems kinda difficult, and my arms and head and legs aren’t attached to my body, so I mean if you could figure out how to do that, maybe send me a photo on twitter @LifeNoggin.

Do you like playing in the snow, or are you someone that hates winter? Let me know now in the comment section below or tell me, what should I talk about next?

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