In late January 2014, after a winter storm crippled Georgia, Alabama and other Southern states, videos spread online of people holding a lighter to a snowball. The snow blackened, gave off a chemical smell and seemed to shrink without dripping, and some posters claimed it was fake "geo-engineered" snow. Meteorologists quickly explained what was really happening, and the science is a neat lesson in how snow behaves.
The 2014 "is this snow?" videos
The storm of 28–29 January 2014 brought rare snow and ice to the Deep South. Within days, several people posted clips of the lighter test, and one widely shared video came from a backyard in Michigan. Blog posts linked the results to chemtrails and military weather manipulation. On 3 February 2014 AccuWeather published a short explainer with its Expert Meteorologist Bob Larson, and local TV stations ran their own tests.
The same experiment returns almost every snowy winter. In 2021 it went around again after the Texas storm, and in 2026 the UK fact-checking charity Full Fact asked several British scientists to explain new versions circulating on X, Instagram and TikTok.
Why snow turns black under a lighter
The black mark comes from the flame. A disposable lighter burns butane, and when the flame touches something cold there is not enough oxygen for complete combustion. The unburned carbon lands on the snow as soot. Professor Elizabeth Morris, a glaciologist at the University of Cambridge, put it simply: the soot comes from the hydrocarbon in the lighter fuel, not from the snow.
The smell has the same source. Richmond, Virginia station WTVR noted that the odour people reported was the butane itself. When its reporters held a match and a lighter to an ordinary snowball, it blackened in exactly the same way.
Where the meltwater goes
Snow is mostly air. Fluffy fresh snow holds far less water than an ice cube of the same size, so it has much less liquid to give. Bob Larson compared the surrounding snow to a sponge: the little meltwater that forms is soaked up by the cold grains around it, where it can refreeze. Meanwhile the thin film of liquid on the surface is heated by the flame and evaporates.
Part of the snow can also pass straight from ice to vapour. The U.S. Geological Survey calls this sublimation, the change between the solid and gaseous phases with no liquid stage in between. Meteorologist Mike Stone of WTVR used it to explain why the snowball seemed to vanish. Put the same snow in a bowl at room temperature and it melts into a small puddle of water, just as AccuWeather pointed out.
Try a fair version of the test
- Fill one clean glass with loose snow and another with ice cubes to the same height.
- Leave both at room temperature and compare the water left once they have melted. The snow gives far less, because most of its volume was air.
- Hold a lighter to a cold metal spoon. It turns black too, which shows the soot comes from the flame.
For more on the physics of ice, read about how snow crystals form and why dry ice behaves differently from water ice.
Related reading
- Yellowknife’s Hot-Water Cloud in Extreme Cold
- Dry Ice in Water: Understanding the Low White Cloud
- Snow Roller: A Strange Meteorological Phenomenon
- Frost Flowers on Lake Ice: A Delicate Surface Pattern
- Spectacular Photos of Bubbles Frozen in Frigid Temperatures
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