Strange Orange Snow Blankets Parts of Eastern Europe, Turns It Into Mars-like Landscape
Strange yellow and orange snow has settled down on parts of eastern Europe, and skiers were treated to a bizarre icy landscape that one might mistake for the red planet. Mountainous parts of Ukraine, Russia, Romania and Bulgaria were the most affected by the mostly harmless cover of unusually-colored snow.
It's widely believed that a mix of sand, dust and other particles like pollen swept up from parts of northern Africa that is now turning the snow orange in certain parts of Europe. The brightly-colored dust was stirred up and carried away by storms in the neighboring parts of the desert in North Africa, according to The Guardian.
As strange as these yellow, ochre and orange snowscapes may look, the phenomenon happens regularly enough, according to the estimates of meteorologists. This event recurs every five years, more or less, and originates from across the Mediterranean.
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"There has been a lot of lifted sand or dust originating from North Africa and the Sahara, from sand storms which have formed in the desert," Steven Keates of the Met Office, the national weather service in the U.K., noted about the unusual event as quoted by The Independent.
"As the sand gets lifted to the upper levels of the atmosphere, it gets distributed elsewhere," he noted, referring to recent satellite imagery from NASA that shows sand, dust and other particulates suspended in the atmosphere and visibly being carried across the ocean.
"When it rains or snows, it drags down whatever is up there, if there is sand in the atmosphere," he added. It is this type of snow that has been steadily falling on parts of Eastern Europe that could be depositing the orange-colored sand and dust on the mountainous parts of the region.
The result is an alien-looking landscape, especially for the skiers and snowboarders that are more familiar with blue and white in their usual slopes. Recent photos posted on Instagram and social media showed skiers already getting used to the orange and yellow slopes.
In some of the images, even the sky itself is tinted in shades of brown, tangerine and yellow, giving the scene a very Mars-like feel. The places that got the heaviest dusting of orange dust were the landing places for major sandstorms that traveled through the atmosphere and over Greece, before finally, likely being pulled down by snow and precipitation over the mountains of eastern Europe.
It's the heaviest sandstorms to make it over Greece and into Russia, one that brought what could be the largest deposits of desert sand across the Mediterranean over the last 10 years, according to the Athens Observatory via WKTR.
While the reddish yellow dust may cause some visibility issues, the colored snow is, for the most part, harmless to people that come in contact with it.
