Winter is on its way and small business owners are prepping for the cold and holiday season. Here are fifteen fun facts to share with your customers this winter.
1. “The air doesn’t need to be super moist to produce impressive amounts of snow. Unlike plain rainfall, a bank of fluffy snow contains lots of air that adds to its bulk. That’s why what would have been an inch of rain in the summer equals about 10 inches of snow in the colder months.”
2. “Aomori City in northern Japan receives more snowfall than any major city on the planet. Each year citizens are pummeled with 312 inches, or about 26 feet, of snow on average.”
3. “On January 28, 1887, a snowflake 15 inches wide and 8 inches thick fell in Fort Keogh, Montana. It's in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest snowflake ever observed.”
4. “On February 17, 2007, Bismarck, North Dakota, set the record for the most snow angels at one time: 8,962 students from several schools made them at once.”
5. “The Southern Hemisphere typically has milder winters than the Northern Hemisphere. This is because the Southern Hemisphere has less land and a more maritime climate.”
6. “Every winter, at least one septillion (that’s 1 followed by 24 zeros) snow crystals fall from the sky.”
7. “The word winter comes from the Germanic wintar which in turn is derived from the root wed meaning 'wet' or water', and so signifies a wet season.”
8. “In the Northern Hemisphere winter lasts from the Winter Solstice (varying between 20 and 22 December) to the Vernal Equinox (varying between 19 and 21 March). In the Southern Hemisphere, winter lasts from June until September.”
9. “The Earth’s orbit around the Sun has very little effect over the Seasons on Earth. Instead, it the tilt of Earth’s rotational axis, which is angled at around 23.4 degrees, that creates seasons.”
10. “A New Zealand insect called the Weta freezes completely solid during winter. When the temps go up, it resumes its business.”
11. “The largest recorded snowman ever built was in Bethel, Maine, in February 1999. It was a whopping 113 feet tall.”
12. “The lowest temperature ever recorded was at Vostok Station in Antarctica. On July 21, 1983, it was -98.2 degrees Celsius (-128.6 Fahrenheit) there!”
13. “Many animals, such as the black bear, hibernate during the winter. In the winter, a black bear's heartbeat can slow to 8 beats a minute (from the usual 40 or so) and it can go as long as 100 days without food!”
14. “Since Romans used daylight and darkness to determine the time, an hour was 45 minutes in the winter and 75 minutes in the summer.”
15. “There are winter blend and summer blend gasoline and it is one of the reasons the gas prices go up in spring.”
