Meet the snow consultant who knows how to save the Winter Olympics from nature
ou know why I have this in the car?” asked Mikko Martikainen, clutching a penknife. “So if we hit a reindeer, I can get out and kill it.” It was a foggy morning in late November, and Martikainen and I were driving through the forests of Lapland in northern Finland, dodging reindeer grazing on the verges. We were headed to a small ski resort near Rovaniemi, a city bang on the Arctic Circle that is the centre of Finland’s winter-tourism industry. According to legend, Father Christmas lives there.
The barren hillsides of Beijing are more likely to be dusted by sand from the Gobi desert than by snow Even by local standards, Martikainen was a fanatic. Horizontal surfaces held no appeal for him. He preferred the adrenaline of downhill, which in Finland is done not in the mountains but on fells that roll gently across the landscape like whales breaching the surface to breathe. He broke his hand in a skiing accident as a teenager and was so determined to carry on that he persuaded the doctor to set his bones in the form of a loose fist so he could continue to grasp a ski pole.
But as snow conditions worsened around the world Martikainen spotted an opportunity. He began talking to physicists and geographers, hydrologists and meteorologists, to learn about how snow forms, how weather affects its quality, how it morphs and melts, and how best to protect it. “If you love snow”, he said, “it is natural to want to organise snow.”
Snow machines take water, mix it with compressed air and blast it into a mist of tiny droplets that freeze into hard balls of ice as they fall to the ground. Under a microscope, these look nothing like snow crystals. They’re just lumpen spheres crammed together like misshapen Maltesers. Snow machines have two big advantages beyond the obvious: creating snow when none is falling. First, artificial snow is about 50 times harder than the real stuff, which makes it far less likely to melt.
The day after our visit to Rovaniemi we went to Levi, a resort 150km north of the Arctic Circle, where the opening slalom race of the women’s World Cup season would be run that weekend. I had skied a few times before, but only once in the past decade – at an indoor ski centre near London. Martikainen greeted this news with something between a smirk and a wince. “You are English,” he said, with audible sympathy.
It didn’t last. By the time we arrived at the hill in Levi, the sky was already dark. Under floodlights, a fearsomely steep slope rose like a white wall, then disappeared into mist. This was the side of skiing that terrifies mere mortals. Extreme danger, combined with the beauty of the landscape and the athletes’ technique, are what makes alpine ski races the marquee events of the winter games.
Martikainen saw two big problems with this approach. The first was productivity. He calculated that it would take one machine 833 days to produce enough snow for a single venue. Second, the technology consumed a vast amount of energy – about 50 times more than conventional snow machines. Above-zero snowmaking at the level necessary for a resort or competition was “bullshit”, Martikainen concluded, “very unecological, very uneconomical”.
Snow banks are crucial because ski resorts depend on early-season snow, Lönnström told me. Many places earn 20% of their annual revenues during the two weeks either side of Christmas: to market a resort, you have to be able to give the public – and your staff – a start date. “Without recycled snow, we wouldn’t be able to open,” Lönnström said.
Water is the ski industry’s dirty secret. Martin Falk, an economist at the University of South-Eastern Norway who studies the environmental impact of skiing, says that only two ski-resort companies in the world publish data on their water usage – and only because local laws governing publicly listed corporations require them to. “I tried to get numbers from the Alps and the Rockies, but nobody would share the information. They do not want to tell you.
The organising committee seemed enthusiastic at first. Martikainen arranged a trip to Finland for the company in charge of building Yanqing’s Olympic venue, complete with a meet-and-greet with the mayor of Helsinki. But after that the Olympic officials went quiet. They decided to rely instead on fresh artificial snow, made by an arsenal of 400 machines lining the courses. These will churn out at least 4m cubic metres of snow to cover a ski area the size of nearly 300 football fields.
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