Baby, it’s COLD outside!

I’ve said before I’m an info-junkie.  I am fascinated by trivial details.  As a writer, it’s a bonus – finding snippets of information to store away for use in a story somewhere.

Given the weather in the past month, this bit caught my eye as I was browsing through  a 1977 edition of Strange Stories, Amazing Facts by The Readers’ Digest Association.

Snow speaks! – The sound you hear is different depending on the temperature. If the snow is only slightly below 32° F, it makes a deep, satisfying crunch as you step through the crust.  At 23°, it creaks – higher up the scale.  The colder it gets, the shriller the pitch, and at 5° is like the screech of high notes on a badly played violin.  More piercing still, when you walk through snow and ice at below zero temperatures the sound of the ice particles smashing together resembles the scraping of a knife over a plate.

This is something I’ve never paid attention to – mostly because when it’s THAT cold, I’m inside enjoying the fireplace. I never really considered the subtle sound of snow.

But isn’t that neat information for the next time you want your reader to know exactly what your hero is facing in that blizzard, or on that ice planet?  Would it sound the same on another world?