[New England is warming more quickly than almost anywhere else on
Earth. ]
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BOSTON IS LOSING ITS SNOW WICKED FAST  
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Katherine J. Wu
December 19, 2022
The Atlantic
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_ New England is warming more quickly than almost anywhere else on
Earth. _

A street in Amesbury, Massachusetts, in 2019, Mark Power / Magnum

 

My first winter in Boston, the last patches of snow on my street
didn’t melt until late June. It was 2015, the year the city broke
its all-time record
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for annual snowfall: 110.3 inches
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more than twice the average. Public transportation morphed into a
hellscape. Schools racked up so many snow days that some had to extend
the academic year
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Dogs began to summit snowbanks to break out of fenced-in yards
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appeared to help locals shovel. The city eventually ran out of places
to dump the piles of snow—prompting then-Mayor Marty Walsh to
consider throwing it all into the harbor like so much British tea
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It was an epic winter, New England at its picturesque best. And I, a
born-and-bred Californian, absolutely hated it. If you’d told me at
the time that Boston winters would get only milder as the years wore
on, I honestly might have said, “Great.”

The problem, of course, is that winters in Boston, and the rest of New
England, have gotten decidedly _too_ mild. The northeastern swath of
the United States
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and the ocean waters around it
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world’s
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fastest [[link removed]]-warming
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places [[link removed]]—a trend
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“most pronounced during winter,” says Alix Contosta, an ecosystem
ecologist at the University of New Hampshire. Studies from Contosta
and others have shown that, over the past century, climate change
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has cleaved
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about three weeks off of snow’s typical tenure in the Northeast.
Should that trend continue
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through the next hundred years, snow may someday cover New England’s
landscape for only about six weeks a year
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about half the norm of recent decades. In the American Northeast, an
iconically winter-loving part of the world, the rapid loss of snow may
deliver a particularly harsh blow—and serve as a bellwether for some
of climate change’s most visible effects worldwide.

Growing frostlessness is hardly just a New England problem. Nowhere is
warming faster than the Arctic, where sea ice continues to vanish at
alarming rates
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imperiling countless creatures that need it to survive. In the
American West [[link removed]],
typically snowcapped mountains are bare, depriving
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the drought-prone region of water. And northerly countries such as
Iceland have begun to hold funerals
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for glaciers
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felled by the planet’s implacable heat.

New England, though, is uniquely positioned to lose its frozen flakes.
It sits at the nexus of several climate-change-driven forces that are
colliding with increasing frequency. The Gulf Stream, a strong ocean
current that lifts warm water from the Gulf of Mexico up and east into
the North Atlantic, has been weakening under the influence of climate
change
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leaving toasty tides that should be in Europe instead lingering along
America’s East Coast. (That’s also why winters in many parts of
Europe are getting more extreme.) The resulting coastal heat curbs the
amount of snow that falls and hastens the pace at which flakes on the
ground melt. At the same time, hotter oceans leave more moisture
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in the air—so when it gets cold enough, more snow falls. And the
Arctic [[link removed]], as it
heats up, is doing a worse job of clinging to its chill
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down the sides of the globe like the whites of a cracked egg.

The result is that New England sees fewer snowstorms
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and many of the ones that _do _still appear are harsher and more
prolific
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than the historical average. “We’re seeing less of the little
nickel-and-dime storms and more of the blockbuster storms,” says
Judah Cohen, a Boston-based climatologist at Atmospheric and
Environmental Research. The winter season has also become wetter and
more volatile. More precipitation descends as rain; the season
whipsaws
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between hot and cold, interspersing freak blizzards with bizarre heat
waves.

As temperatures continue to climb, seasons—once cleanly separated
from one another by quirks such as humidity and heat—“are starting
to meld into each other,” says Jacqueline Hung, a climate scientist
at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. Winters are beginning later
and ending sooner
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eventually, “we might start to see a loss of four seasons,” Hung
told me.

That shift has become visible in the span of just decades. Chris
Newell, a co-founder of the Akomawt Educational Initiative and a
member of the Passamaquoddy Tribe, recalls the snowy seasons of his
childhood in Indian Township, Maine, stretching from December through
March. Powder would pile up so high on the side of his house that he
could nearly clamber onto his roof. Now “it’s like a different
world,” he told me—a change that threatens the identity of his
community. Passamaquoddy history is interlaced with the land; the
tribe’s very name is an homage to their love for spearing pollock. A
warming world isn’t just about the climate, Newell said: “This is
going to change our relationship to our own territory.”

Many New Englanders still consider frequent flurries a
nuisance—something they have to shovel away or kick through. But
snow’s seasonal tenure has long supported local livelihoods; its
impending sabbatical threatens them. Ski resorts, stripped of their
main source of commerce, have turned to synthetic snow or closed down
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Loggers, best able to do their work when the ground
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is frozen
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or snow-covered
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are now struggling to harvest timber without damaging the soil. Rising
temperatures year-round may even make maple syrup
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parts of New England harder to collect and less sweet
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And it’s not just humans in climate change’s crosshairs. “I
don’t think people appreciate everything that snow does for us,”
the University of New Hampshire’s Contosta told me. Snow acts as an
insulator for fragile soil, swaddling it like a fluffy down coat; its
light, shiny surface reflects the sun’s rays so they don’t
overtoast the earth. Plants and microbes thrive beneath it. Animals
burrow inside of it to evade predators. When snow vanishes from
habitats, frost is forced deeper into the soil
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causing tree roots
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rot. Lyme-disease-carrying ticks
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killed off by winter frost—survive into spring at higher rates
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which allows them to latch on to more mammals
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such as moose and humans, as temperatures warm. Also worrying is the
torrential rainfall replacing snow, which can leach nutrients out of
soil and dump them into rivers
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starving local forests and fields, says Carol Adair, an ecosystem
ecologist at the University of Vermont.

These changes are happening so quickly that local wildlife can’t
keep up. Alexej Sirén, another University of Vermont ecologist, told
me that many snowshoe hares
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have evolved over millennia to seasonally camouflage themselves, are
now shedding their brown summer coats for white winter ones
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before snow blankets the ground. During the particularly snowless
winter of 2015 to 2016, hunters told Sirén they felt guilty: The
hares had just gotten _too _easy to catch.

Snow is woven into the cultural DNA
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America’s Northeast as well. New England, so the saying goes, has
“nine months of winter and three months of darned poor sledding”;
the first photographs of snowflakes
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were snapped by a farmer in Vermont. And it should surprise exactly no
one that _The Atlantic_—which used to be based in Boston—has
published some lengthy
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odes
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to nature’s dandruff, including one that is titled, simply,
“Snow.”

Of course, appreciation for snow was here long before there was a New
England at all. Darren Ranco, an anthropologist at the University of
Maine and a member of the Penobscot Nation (which won many an early
winter battle against English colonizers
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wearing snowshoes), told me that his people’s notion of seasons is
tied to the 13 moons
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that make up each year. Two of them, _takwaskwayí-kisohs_ (“moon
of crusts of ice on the snow”) and _asəpáskwačess-kisohs_
(“moon when ice forms on the margins of lakes”), roughly
correspond to March and December, respectively. Now “that doesn’t
make as much sense,” Ranco said.

In the aftermath of gargantuan nor’easters, climatic trends are easy
to forget—a possible risk this coming winter, which Cohen thinks may
be snowier than the past two. It’s easy, Adair told me, to slip into
the mindset of “Oh, it’s cold, so everything’s fine.” A sturdy
storm or two might (like fresh snowfall, perhaps) erase worries about
what the rest of the century could bring.

But many people need only look into their own past to recognize what
has been lost. Contosta fell in love with the snowscapes of New
England when she moved to Connecticut in the 1990s. While on a walk in
the woods, she saw, for the first time, how crystals cloaked the
ground and branches in gleaming veils of pearl. “The woods took on a
totally different personality in the snow,” she told me. In the
two-plus decades since, Contosta has watched much of that powdery
wonderland literally melt away. The winter ground is barer; the trees
are nuder. Even her two sons feel ambivalent at best these days about
winter. The elder—who is adopted and spent his toddlerhood in
Florida—“went berserk” when he moved to New England about 10
years ago. “He ran outside with bare feet in his pajamas and was
eating snow off the trees,” Contosta told me. “He thought it was
the most amazing thing.” Now, though, the start of the year brings
mostly slush.

On the precipice of my ninth New England winter, I’m still not a
total convert. But I’ve been in this area long enough to get
nostalgic for the snow I once loathed. I don’t know what the
Northeast is without snowy winters. I wonder how I will describe snow
to a generation that might only rarely get to see it—how I will
explain to children of the future why Norman Rockwell paintings look
so white. I don’t regret the horror I felt when I experienced my
first big snowstorm. But the next one I’m in, I’ll try to enjoy
while I still can.

Katherine J. Wu [[link removed]]
is a staff writer at _The Atlantic._

* Climate Change
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* New England
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