Vox
By
February 10, 2022
This year’s Winter Olympics is a massive logistical undertaking, like every Olympic Games. The Chinese government poured billions of dollars into things like bullet trains, event venues, and housing. Perhaps its most visible investment is the substance that makes so many events possible: snow.
Beijing normally has very little snow, which in decades past might have been cause for panic. When an unseasonably snowless winter threatened the 1964 Olympic Games in Innsbruck, Austria, the Austrian Army had to schlep 20,000 blocks of ice and 40,000 cubic meters of snow from the mountains. This year, for the first time ever, all the snow at the Winter Olympics is made to order and blasted out of snow cannons. But what is this stuff, anyway?