Helsinki finally rids self of giant pile of snow from last winter

Since moving to Minneapolis, I've come to appreciate the problem of snow storage—what do you with all the the snow once you've shoveled it up, and what happens to the inevitable giant mountains plowing creates? It's a serious, annual logistical problem for snowy places that continues even though the global land and surface temperature for last January was the fourth hottest on record. Regional variation. It's a bitch.

In Helsinki, Finland, 20,000 truckloads of snow plowed from city streets throughout last winter was stacked into a huge pile, which is only now finally melting away. Just in time for next winter. The pile was measured at 27 meters (more than 88 feet) high in April. Last week, the height dipped below 1 meter (3 feet), which was enough for the local newspaper to declare victory.

Of course, when you have a snow pile that big, things get lost in there. So the melting process has been a bit of a treasure hunt ...

As the months have passed since April, the vanishing pile has revealed from its bowels a whole host of interesting and strange artefacts: at least some jeans, a concrete "pig" as used to deter drivers from using a street, flower boxes, and plastic spades and shovels. Almost at the death, just recently, a digger driver working on the pile unearthed two motorbikes.

Helsingin Sanomat newspaper, International Edition: The End is Nigh—Maununneva snow pile down to just one metre

Image: I couldn't find a shot of the Helsinki snow pile. This one is from Syracuse, New York, in a file photo from the Syracuse Post-Standard. Syracuse's own snow piles have lasted into mid-August in the past.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

Maggie goes places and talks to people. Find out where she'll be speaking next.

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aarline

Not using all that snow to build a giant snowman is a real tragedy.
Maurice Reeves

Queue all the “See, global warming is bunk” comments, and the obligatory mention in Congress and/or Fox News to that effect as well.
- Maggie Koerth-Baker
  
  Which is why I added in the NOAA link.
  
  It’s also worth noting that, while some places can be colder even while the planet as a whole gets warmer, in other places warmer winters actually mean more snow, because you hit that snow-not-ice sweet spot in temperature more often.
  - Niklas
    
    True. Also, a rise is snow/precipitation is more likely to be attributed to rising temperatures because a cold atmosphere can hold very little water vapor while a warmer atmosphere can hold more. For example a place where the average winter temperature is -15Â°C normally will have perhaps -12Â°C and some extra snowfall.
- mn_camera
  
  And the denialists will inevitably come back out of the woodwork with the first frost.
  
  They deliberately ignore local/regional variations, skip right past the inevitability of those variations being more extreme, and try their (not-so-very-)best to dismiss the resulting local extremes – aka “weather” – that broader climate changes have begun to produce.
  
  Of what value is puny quantitatively verifiable science against their powerful faith (or more likely, commercial) based conjecture?
triggerbln

Switzerland had a very pragmatic way of dealing with this: When they built Zurich-Kloten Airport in the 50s, they built snow-burning chutes with oil burners on the ground :)
PubliusV

This past winter in the parking lot of a mall in Roseville, MN, I saw front end loaders dumping buckets of snow in a propane fired snow melter. The melter was positioned over a storm drain so the melted snow could easily flow away.
Skidds

All of that stored energy going to waste… Pack that white stuff around the coil in your air conditioner to trick the thermostat and you make out big time on the electric bill.
- Anonymous
  
  There are very few air conditioners in Finnish homes.
- Anonymous
  
  That’s not stored energy, it’s stored entropy.
  - Skidds
    
    I stand corrected. I should have realized that just because something has the potential to save energy it is not energy itself.
Anonymous

I don’t understand how this is a problem. It’s just snow… I mean, couldn’t they melt the whole thing with a flame thrower in 10 minutes?
CH

An account of glacier climbing on the Manunneva snow pile in April. :)
http://laajis.wordpress.com/2010/04/08/jaatikkovaelluksella-%e2%80%93-helsingissa/
knoxblox

They’re right there on the edge of the gulf. Why don’t they just load up some boats and dump it out in the deep water?
- Anonymous
  
  Icebergs.
- Anonymous
  
  Creating uncharted giant blocks of snow and ice in an area full of shipping seems like a poor idea.
- Ugly Canuck
  
  Or simply dump it in?
  - jackie31337
    
    I also live in the Helsinki region, and I had wondered this past winter why they didn’t just dump the snow in the water. The answer is that (as this article mentions) it’s not just snow. It also contains a large amount of gravel (which is spread on the roads for traction because it’s usually too cold for road salt to be effective), automotive chemicals and other pollutants, and apparently sometimes even motorbikes. If they had dumped the snow straight into the sea, all of that would be at the bottom now.
    
    @Skidds All of that stored energy going to waste… Pack that white stuff around the coil in your air conditioner to trick the thermostat and you make out big time on the electric bill.
    
    Most Finns don’t have air conditioners, precisely because Finland is more likely to get abnormally cold weather than abnormally hot weather. As it happened, this year we got both.
    - Ugly Canuck
      
      Ah so, I had expected some such reason. Thanx.
      - knoxblox
        
        It figures. I try to come up with a helpful solution, and just wind up polluting the bay. Be thankful I’m not an engineer.
    - CH
      
      Actually there is one snow dumping place in Helsinki for dumping into the water (http://www.cartinafinland.fi/kuvapankki/fi/picture/18704/Lumenkaatopaikka+-+Hernesaari.html), and two snow melting stations that use warm water from a water treatment plant. But yeah, you don’t really want to just dump that snow in the sea. Last winter the various snow dumping places received about 200 000 truckloads of snow so that would also be a lot of stuff you don’t want in the water.
      
      Oh, and boats as somebody suggested don’t really work. That would need an armada of boats, so too costly. And of course have an icbreaker on call to keep the route and dumping area open from ice. It’s much easier to just dump from land into the sea.
Anonymous

About time to redefine permafrost, maybe?
Anonymous

We had a freak hailstorm in Yonkers last July. At work our facilities crew plowed it all up into huge mounds which lasted weeks. Snow and ice piles for weeks in the middle of summer! It was a first for me.
Nadreck

Toronto has a handy valley running down the middle where we dump what little snow we get: in the past the dump used to fill up and then we were down to loading the snow onto empty boxcars returning to the States from auto plants up here.

The valley is below the fancy bridge you see in “Resident Evil II”: the one the residents of Racoon City are trying to escape the zombie plague on. Racoon city is a great alias for Toronto as that valley is loaded with the little bandits. The fancy sides of the bridge are anti-suicide barriers to make people walk over to the next bridge and jump off of that.
Anonymous

While I lived in Helsinki in the 70′s, I could see the harbor from my apartment window. They had a much better solution for all the snow then. A little boat would be driven around in a little circle in the harbor to keep it from freezing, and the city simply dumped the snow in there. Wonder if they still do it that way.
MrJM

So the snow in Helsinki is Finnish’d?
Sekino

I think another reason why they couldn’t just dump it all in the ocean could be that it would be viewed as water pollution. This isn’t just snow, it’s everything the plows scoop off the streets.

There are a few such ‘snow dumps’ around where I live (Ottawa, Canada) and it’s impressive- and pretty gross- to see the white mountains gradually turn to smaller dark brown hills as the snow melts and the gravel, salt residue, dirty sand and generic road crud is left behind.
DJBudSonic

A related humorous long story made short – My father’s favorite bank teller came out after work (in a somewhat crime-ridden city, during a mid-winter storm in Northern Michigan) to find her car missing. It was reported stolen, and replaced by insurance after a police investigation.

In the spring the snow plow pile in the corner of the bank parking lot melted, revealing her only slightly-crushed ‘stolen’ car. Why she did not remembered where she parked is beyond me, but things get confusing in a snow storm, I guess. I never found out if she had to give the replacement car back.

When I was a kid we would occasionally play on these parking lot ski hills, usually it was a too-abrupt transition from slope to pavement!
Anonymous

Hi, here’s some snow porn from last winter in Helsinki..

Dumping to the sea in January, concerns over the practice
http://www.hs.fi/kaupunki/artikkeli/1135252336859?ref=lk_hs_ka_1

Big storm on the last day of January
http://www.flickr.com/photos/voidobjects/4318941277/in/photostream/

The next day
http://www.flickr.com/photos/voidobjects/4362728875/

The depots are filling up in February, 1 million cubic meters (35 million cubic feet) of snow dumped so far
http://www.hs.fi/kaupunki/artikkeli/1135253272741?ref=lk_hs_ka_1

The depth of the snow was measured to be 61cm (2ft) in 23. February. However, it’s still short of the record 81cm (2,5ft) measured in 1966.
http://yle.fi/alueet/helsinki/helsinki/2010/02/helsingin_lumi-_ja_pakkastilanne_ei_hatyyttele_ennatyksia_1472326.html?origin=rss

The biggest pile in March, concerns over whether it will melt over the summer
http://www.hs.fi/kaupunki/artikkeli/P%C3%A4%C3%A4kaupunkiseudun+lumet+eiv%C3%A4t+ehk%C3%A4+ehdi+sulaa+koko+kes%C3%A4n%C3%A4/1135253551180

The pile in the end of April. As you can see, it’s not sparkling white anymore.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/79783791@N00/4612365663/
Anonymous

Oh, and to follow that winter up, last summer in Finland was warmest in living memory. That sorta shut up the denialists which were getting pretty loud over last winter..
Brainspore

Just do what we do here in California: store all the snow on top of tall mountains so it doesn’t get in the way.
TellusCitizen

Depressing. Snow. And I live about +10h _North_ of Helsinki.
Anonymous

One picture from the Helsinki (Maununneva) snow pile in spring: https://laajis.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/dsc01326.jpg

Note that this isn’t the only place used for storing and melting snow. There are at least ten of these places in Helsinki. Some places use lukewarm mild sewage water for melting snow, but they quickly run out of capacity. In some places, the snow is simply ditched into the sea. One of the big problems aside capacity is chemicals, salt, dirt and other pollutants, as well as small scale flooding. There’s enough dirt on top of the piles for grass to start growing before all is melted:
http://s.omakaupunki.hs.fi/news/images/uploads/lumikasaherttoniemi.540×405.jpg

The cool snow even fools the nature around it. Early spring plants (like Coltsfoot) keep growing and flowering in June by the snow piles.
CH

This year has been really unusual weather wise in Finland. I live in the greater Helsinki area, and last fall when the temperature went below freezing, it stayed there until spring, which is really unusual. Then it started to snow… and continued to snow… and some more snow… until I was totally fed up with the =”(#”!=(!=( snow! I had no place to shovel it anymore, had to start moving old piles of snow more back so I could continue piling up new snow piles higher than me. The city was also running out of places to dump the snow.

Then summer hit, and we got a record long hot spell. It really has been a strange year, but I home this coming winter will be unusually warm. I’m still totally fed up with shoveling snow!