If the water is clear then why does the snow appear white?

Weather of Arabia - The land is covered in a white dress after heavy snowfall, but if you open the water tap, you will find that the water is transparent, and so is the ice, then, why does the snow appear white?

It is related to how the transparent material turns into a white thing, so if you take a piece of transparent glass, such as window glass, and smash it, with a hammer, into small pieces of glass, it will turn white, and this difference in color occurs due to the way the light interacts with the surfaces Monoculars like window pane, versus multi-faceted surfaces like broken glass, and the same concept applies to snow.

According to optics, when light hits an object, it: It either passes through it, is absorbed by the body, or is reflected from it, and when the light hits a smooth flat surface such as glass or ice, its visible rays pass through it, and because our eyes do not see things except through the light waves reflected from the objects or that are absorbed, This is why glass and ice often appear as transparent objects.

In the case of shattered glass, there are countless uneven surfaces, and when light strikes these irregular surfaces, it reflects and scatters in all directions, and this also applies to snowflakes, which are made up of hundreds of very small ice crystals, differing in shape and structure. And because the light that hits the glass shards or snowflakes is reflected back equally, these rays include all the colors of the compound wavelengths of visible light (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet), which together appear white, which is why our eyes see color White when we look at snow.

Other colors of snow

Although the natural color of snow is white, it is known to take on more color gradations, as blocks of ice, glaciers and glaciers can sometimes appear blue when light enters their depths through cracks (rather than being reflected off their surfaces). As this light travels inside the snow and ice, it is scattered during its path through the large number of ice crystals, and the longer the path of light increases, the more scattered it, and because water and ice absorb red light more than blue light, the light appears after leaving the layers of snow in the shorter blue wavelengths , Which are reflected towards our eyes rather than at longer red wavelengths, and the longer the scattering repeats, the more distinct the blue.

Pink or red snow, called "watermelon snow," has also been documented. A type of red algae that lives inside the snow mass causes it to become pink or red, and particles and other organisms can color the snow as well. This is why, hypothetically, snow can be any color of the rainbow.