You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey Shortwavers, winter is here, at least for those of us who live in the northern hemisphere of our dear planet, and depending on where you are, there may or may not be snow.

The Guinness world record folks have compiled a bunch of records related to snow,

and NPR's N. N. N. N. N.

N. N. And NPR's Nill Greenfield Boys was recently looking at them.

Hey, now.

Hey!

Okay, hit me with some snow records.

All right, how about the longest time spent in full body contact with snow. So that would be 105 minutes and two seconds.

Oh my gosh those last two seconds must have been like intense. Okay let's hear another one. How about the most people

making snow angels simultaneously? So that one is 8,962 people who gathered in North Dakota.

And then there's the largest snowflake.

So the Guinness people say there was a snowflake, 15 inches in diameter and 8 inches thick that fell in Montana in 1887.

Wow, okay, so a snowflake that was more than a foot across, is that like even possible?

Okay, that's what I wanted to know. I mean, come on, that is a big snowflake and

what I learned is that, know first of all you have to

make it clear what you mean by the word snowflake and I recently talked to a

couple of scientists about that one of them is Kenneth Liberect. He's a physicist at Cal Tech and that

particular Guinness world record has always kind of bugged him. So he told me

that just this past year, like six months ago, he decided

to do something about it.

Ooh, I'm intrigued. Okay, today on the show, we look at Snowflakes, how big they can really get,

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