Fact File: ‘Fake snow’ that doesn’t melt when burned has scientific explanation

Several videos posted online last week showed people burning snow with a lighter and questioning why the snow turned black and didn’t seem to melt. Some social media users claimed the snow was fake and “geo-engineered.”

A chemistry professor who researches ice and snow says the snow is real. The black marks are from the lighter’s soot, and the snow doesn’t look like it’s melting because it’s turning from a solid to a gas without a liquid stage in between, a process called sublimation.

THE CLAIM

As snowy weather descends on the East Coast and other parts of North America, social media users are taking to various platforms to describe what they view as a strange phenomenon affecting their snow.

In the videos, people take fallen snow from outside, form a snowball, and take a lighter to the snow. They observe that the snow appears to take on black “burn” marks but doesn’t seem to be melting.

“FYI — Snow should melt & it certainly shouldn’t turn black,” one poster wrote on the X platform, formerly Twitter, whose accompanying video of a woman burning a snowball earned around 1.8 million views.

Others who tried similar experiments posted their results to Facebook and TikTok and made similar remarks about the “burnt” snow and its seeming resistance to melting.

“It’s disappearing but there’s no water going anywhere. Where’s the water?” a woman asks as she holds her snowball to the flame.

The X users and several commenters made comments about “geo-engineered snow,” suggesting the flame-resistant snow was unnatural or man-made.

THE FACTS

There are a few reasons the snowballs in the video might appear to be resistant to melting under the lighter’s flame, said Tara Kahan, a professor in the department of chemistry at the University of Saskatchewan who researches pollutants in ice and snow.

One is snow metamorphism, where as temperature increases, the air in the space between snow crystals gets replaced by melted water, so it doesn’t look as if the snow is melting even though it is.

Another is sublimation, which is when a substance goes straight from a solid to a gas state without a liquid state in between.

“So instead of melting first and then evaporating, it just essentially disappears. So you don’t see the water. If the snow isn’t as tightly packed, what you would see is it would look like the snowball was shrinking,” Kahan said.

Kahan said she and her research team tried the snow experiment outside with two different lighters and packed it tightly.

“We didn’t see what looked like a lot of melting. But if you look carefully, or if you had a bit that was sort of sticking out a little bit, so it wasn’t quite as packed as the rest — that part would immediately sort of shrink,” she said.

So why did the snowballs in the videos appear to “burn” and turn black?

That’s because the soot from the butane used in many lighters is transferring onto the snowballs, Kahan said.

“It’s actually the soot in the flame that’s getting really hot and then emitting light. If you didn’t have soot you wouldn’t see the flame. When you hold a lighter to anything, whether it’s snow or glass or something else, you will see it turn black because you’re depositing soot on it,” she said.

Claims about the melt-resistant or scorched snow aren’t new. They usually crop up on social media in the winter as people come across the supposed phenomenon and test it out themselves.

Science communicators from Neil Degrasse Tyson to Hank Green have debunked the myth in the past.

Kahan said she understands if people feel concerned about their snow being contaminated.

“Snow can be polluted, just like water can be polluted,” she said.

But she emphasized that what people are seeing is natural snow, and there is a scientific explanation behind the way it acts and reacts.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 9, 2025.

Marissa Birnie, The Canadian Press