You 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.
“It didn’t used to be like this,” Martikainen said, staring through the windscreen wipers of his white 4x4. We were approaching the Santa Claus Holiday Village on the outskirts of town, a complex of peaked-roof wooden buildings flogging Christmas tat. The only thing interrupting the festive vibe was the weather: it was about 2℃ and a soft, grey drizzle was descending. What little snow there was lay in dispiriting patches of slush.
“When I was growing up, the winter arrived in mid-October, and it would stay cold until May,” continued Martikainen, who at 64 has the wind-roughened skin of someone who’s spent a lifetime in the Arctic cold. “But around 2000, things began to change. The first snowfall might come in October, but then there are these huge fluctuations.”
Martikainen’s ruthless (or compassionate?) efficiency with small weapons is matched only by his obsession with skiing – and with having the right stuff to do it on. He is the world’s leading snow consultant, advising snow-based businesses how to protect their most essential asset. Over the years his clients have included ski resorts, indoor snow domes and even the emir of Ras al-Khaimah, a small state in the United Arab Emirates, who wanted to build an indoor ski slope in the desert. (Martikainen’s suggestion was a venue in the form of a giant pair of skiing goggles.) He has also been the go-to guy for the biggest snow event of all: the Winter Olympics.
Martikainen made his Olympic debut at the 2014 games in Sochi. Over the past century, the winter games have been held in hotter environments. This is partly because climate change has driven temperatures higher and partly because, as the games have grown in size, complexity and cost, fewer places have been willing or able to accommodate them. The average February temperature of host cities has risen from 0.4℃ from the 1920s to the 1950s, to 6.3℃ in the 21st century. Sochi, a palm-tree festooned resort town on Russia’s Black Sea coast, has the dubious honour of having been the warmest ever. During the competition at the RusSki Gorki ski-jumping centre, daytime temperatures averaged about 10℃ and once spiked to 20℃.
The barren hillsides of Beijing are more likely to be dusted by sand from the Gobi desert than by snow
In 2017, Martikainen got a call from the organising committee of the Beijing Olympics, asking for help with their snow strategy for the games that begin on February 4th. “I was the first Finn to meet the mayor of Beijing,” he told me proudly during our drive.
In Beijing, the problem isn’t heat but drought. Yanqing, where the alpine ski races will be held, gets an average of 5cm of snow a year; the chance of a flurry during the games will hover around 1%. The barren hillsides are more likely to be dusted by sand blowing in from the Gobi desert than by snow.
Martikainen’s job is to guarantee snow even when it’s warm or dry. Skiing accounts for over half of all Winter Olympic events: it’s impossible to imagine the games without athletes hurtling down peaks at 80 miles an hour (130kph), snow spraying out behind them like a car exhaust. But in recent years, the games have become as much a stunning display of high-octane sliding talent as a testament to a bleaker trend: the struggle to maintain our way of life in a rapidly changing environment. Winter as we know it is on the way out.
Martikainen grew up in Varkaus, a small industrial city in central Finland, where learning to ski was like learning to walk. There was snow on the ground six months a year. “Everyone was connected to the snow in one way or another,” Martikainen told me as we drove. “If they didn’t go skiing on the hill, they definitely did cross country. Skiing was our smartphone.”
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 (the country doesn’t have any) 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.
Even the onset of summer proved only a minor obstacle to Martikainen. His WhatsApp profile picture shows skiing down a hill covered in a dense carpet of lingonberry plants. He once tried his luck on a giant pile of coal outside a local paper mill but arrived at the bottom unconvinced of coal’s future as a medium for winter sports: “Too sticky.”
The Winter Olympics are a testament to our struggle to maintain our way of life in a rapidly changing environment
At 25, Martikainen was tapped to coach the Finnish alpine ski team but resigned after two years because, he said, cross-country skiing got all the funding. After that, he did stints running a sports centre and what he calls the world’s smallest ski resort, with two slopes and a vertical drop of just 50 metres.
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.”
The first person to really understand snow was a Japanese physicist, Nakaya Ukichiro. In the 1930s he began taking thousands of photographs of snow crystals in the mountains of Hokkaido. Snow is created when water vapour crystallises in the sky. The classic type – the kind on greetings cards and Christmas jumpers – is a six-sided star. But, as Nakaya found, most snow looks nothing like this. These “stellar dendrites” are produced only at temperatures of around -15℃ when flakes fall through humid air and pick up enough water molecules to ornament themselves with ferns and filigrees.
Nakaya documented crystals no one had seen before, working out how temperature and humidity levels affected their shape. There were bullets and drums, spinning tops and chandeliers. Although each crystal is distinct, scientists now organise them into 80 different forms. Beyond that, says Kenneth Libbrecht of the California Institute of Technology, who specialises in the physics of snow, “naming snow crystals is a bit like naming pasta. You can make endless different shapes, and call them different pastas, but it sort of loses interest after a while.”
The variety that makes snow so wondrous to most of us is nothing but a nuisance if you’re organising the Winter Olympics or managing a ski resort. Snow professionals aspire to control their product in the same way that McDonald’s controls hamburgers or Starbucks caramel lattes. For a ski business, snow is not so much a natural phenomenon as an industrial commodity. That is why every Winter Olympics since Lake Placid in 1980 has relied on artificial snow, also known as “technical snow” or, as the French loftily put it, “neige de culture”. According to International Ski Federation rules, it would now effectively be impossible to make competition-grade slopes without using artificial snow. If real snow falls during the race, the rules suggest that it be “removed from the course”.
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. Compared with a piste of natural snow, an artificial one will last up to five weeks longer when temperatures rise above zero.
Second, the structure of artificial snow is uniform. The natural sort settles into packs with wildly different textures. At one end of the spectrum is powder – more air than ice, and so light and smooth to ski through that powder junkies call it “cold smoke”. At the other end is graupel: snow that becomes covered with ice as it falls and feels gritty under your skis. Whether you’re in Calgary or Kitzbühel, Banff or Beijing, with artificial snow you know what you are going to get.
Winter as we know it is on the way out
Where the Olympics goes the rest of the ski industry tends to follow. “Every ski resort is trying to make itself independent of nature,” says Robert Steiger of the University of Innsbruck, who studies the winter-sports industry. Graphs that show the growth of snowmaking around the world ascend as steeply as Mont Blanc: in 2009 about a fifth of slopes in the French Alps were supplied by snow-machines. Today it is over half, and rising fast. In some resorts in America the artificial takeover is nearly total.
When Martikainen and I arrived at Rovaniemi, we met another Mikko, Mikko Lönnström, who manages the pistes for Finland’s largest chain of ski resorts. A pale, wiry man in his mid-40s, Lönnström was frazzled. Through the rain we could see a muddy hill lined with snow machines. In previous years it has taken about 100 hours for these cannons to make enough snow to open the slope. But this year the machines were dormant: since the first snow fell in October, temperatures had been yo-yo-ing. “It has been too warm for snowmaking,” Lönnström said. “We’re due to open tomorrow.”
What matters for snowmaking is the combination of air temperature and humidity, what’s known as “wet-bulb temperature”. Just as human bodies struggle to cool down on humid days, so snowflakes struggle to freeze in moist air. At a wet-bulb temperature of -8℃, which, for example, registers when the air temperature is -5℃ and the humidity a low 20%, it’s easy to make snow. But as the air’s cooling capacity declines, snowmakers have to compensate by pumping less water through the machines. The result is ruinous inefficiency. It takes three times as much energy – and three times longer – to make a cubic metre of snow at a wet-bulb reading of -4℃ as it does at -8℃. At -3℃, you’re using quadruple the energy you needed at -8℃ – though it’s technically possible to make snow, you’d really rather not. Above -2℃, forget about it. The water won’t freeze as it falls to the ground.
“People think that if you have snowmaking you have 100% snow security,” says Carmen de Jong, a hydrologist at the University of Strasbourg. “That is not the case.” In some parts of Lapland, the natural snow season has shrunk by as much as 25 days in the past half century. The Finnish Meteorological Institute projects that the number of days with snow cover could drop by 30% by 2100.
“Every ski resort is trying to make itself independent of nature”
Martikainen feels these losses deeply. He remembers crying as a boy when he heard the first spring rain of the year pattering against his bedroom window. As an adult he developed a habit, which he still observes each year, of celebrating the first snowfall by drinking a glass of brandy and listening to Rachmaninoff’s wintry piano concertos.
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. “If you don’t get a feeling for snow, how will you understand?”
We were the first skiers to the top of the fell that morning. Martikainen was standing next to me in a blue helmet and multicoloured, mirrored ski goggles, like a psychedelic version of RoboCop. As we set off down the hill, my progress was faltering. The snow had melted a little the previous day and refrozen overnight, forming a coarse crust that made my skis judder and shake as they tried to get a grip. “It’s all about rhythm and flow!” Martikainen shouted encouragingly. “It’s like dancing!”
Martikainen was showing off his moves. In the lift to the top, I’d mentioned a YouTube video of Bode Miller, a great American racer who lost a ski during a competition and completed the course on one leg. A few minutes later I turned around to find Martikainen gliding after me, grinning as he carved perfect turns with his left ski slung over his shoulder.
My dodgy technique notwithstanding, the morning’s exercise was a reminder of why skiing has such a hold on people, despite its often ludicrous expense and growing incompatibility with the rhythms of nature. Beneath us lay an endless forest of spruce and silver birch, dotted with lakes gradually thickening into ice. The winter sun crawled across the horizon, staining the snow pink.
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.
As Martikainen and I stood at the bottom of the forbidding run, he kicked disdainfully at the 8cm of natural snow under our feet. “It’s like porridge,” he said. “No structure. Asking professional skiers to race on that would be like asking Manchester City to play in a hay field.”
Density is the metric that matters. Natural snow weighs between 30kg and 250kg per cubic metre, depending on the kind of flakes and their capacity to trap air. Even the densest natural snow is too soft for racing. “After ten athletes you would be down to bare rocks,” says Kalle Palander, a former world-champion skier from Finland. “Professionals have so much speed and so much power they would cut right through it.” By contrast, pellets of artificial snow pack together tightly, like ball bearings in a bowl. Fake snow weighs around 450kg per cubic metre when it comes out of the machine and is then compressed further for competition.
A group of grizzled workmen, cigarettes dangling from their lips, gathered not far from us. They had spent the day working their way down the length of the course, injecting water deep into the piste to freeze it hard. By now it was approaching the desired density – 650-700kg per cubic metre – much closer to pure ice (900kg) than fluffy powder. When I knelt down to tap the surface, it felt like cold stone under my knuckles. As we walked across it, we left no footprints.
If Lake Placid in 1980 marked the moment when snowmaking conquered professional skiing, the Vancouver Olympics in 2010 proved that snow machines had their limits. That winter was so warm that crocuses sprouted in the city’s gardens and the tennis courts were full in February. At Cypress Mountain, the lowest of the competition’s ski sites, it was impossible to make snow, so helicopters flew in 57 tonnes of straw to act as a base layer on the slopes, which were then covered with 350 truckloads of snow transported from higher altitudes.
Watching this debacle unfold on TV, Martikainen decided to pitch his services to the organising committee of the next Olympics, in Sochi, where conditions were likely to be even worse. He was hired immediately.
“If you used natural snow, after ten athletes you’d be down to bare rocks”
One option Martikainen investigated was what’s called above-zero snowmaking. Over the past two decades, a new generation of machines has emerged that promise to make snow in any weather. These contraptions use a variety of mechanisms. Some are simple: giant freezers that churn out ice cubes which are then mechanically crushed into powder. Others use more elaborate techniques, such as freezing air and water with liquid nitrogen.
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”.
He had another, more quixotic idea: if we can’t make fresh snow, why don’t we just stop all the old snow from melting? Storing snow and ice is an ancient craft. Before refrigeration, Scandinavians collected snow in winter and insulated it under deep layers of sawdust throughout the summer to keep milk cool. In China and Japan, people used discarded rice husks to do the same.
Martikainen was already interested in snow recycling from his days as a coach. Sports was less professionalised at the time, and once spring came the skiers he was training took four months off. Martikainen thought this was crazy: “The more snow months you have, the better skier you will be.”
He had started experimenting with preserving snow in the early 2000s. When he eventually approached ski resorts about it, he was laughed at. “I thought he was maybe sick in the head,” said Lönnström, the manager at Rovaniemi.
Water is the ski industry’s dirty secret
No longer. Over the years, Martikainen has refined his techniques: done correctly, as little as 5% of snow may melt over the course of two months, even if summer temperatures rise to 20℃. The day I visited Rovaniemi, a squad of trucks was busy moving snow from enormous piles and spreading it over muddy ski runs. It had been wrapped in insulating felt the year before and preserved in depots on the slopes. The ski jump, painted in gloomy military grey, was still bare, but behind us the cross-country enthusiasts were already enjoying the recycled snow that had been laid down on the track encircling the resort. Their skis emitted a delicate whispering sound as they glided past.
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.
When Martikainen started working with Sochi, nobody had ever tried to salvage snow on the scale required for the Olympics. But in their desperation not to embarrass themselves, the Russians were ready to try. The organising committee pressed Martikainen to stockpile as much snow as he could. In the years leading up to the games, he set up storage facilities in mountains in the Caucasus and over time the snow mounds grew to colossal proportions: nearly 1m cubic metres, enough to fill 41 Carnegie Halls.
The snow wasn’t always of great quality. During an Olympic test event in 2012, the ski jump was an odd brown colour – “Coca-Cola snow”, as Martikainen remembers it. During the games themselves, it was so warm that even at higher altitudes the snow became slushy and had to be hardened with 24 tonnes of salt flown in at the last minute from Switzerland. But Martikainen had done his job: despite the spring weather, there was snow at the seaside.
Beijing, of all places, is in need of recycled snow. Martikainen’s first visit to the city was in 2005, when he was invited to speak at a conference on the country’s burgeoning ski industry. “The resorts I visited were pumping groundwater into snow machines,” he told me. And this was when China had a handful of ski resorts – now they claim to have hundreds, most of them in the snowless region around Beijing.
When the organisers of the 2022 games invited him to develop a “vision plan” for its skiing venues, Martikainen recommended they combine snowmaking with a large snow-recycling operation. This wasn’t because it was too warm for the machines – winters in northern China are reliably freezing – but because the area has so little water. Recycling requires much less water because you can harvest the snow and store it year after year. Overall, Martikainen reckoned he could cut the quantity of water used for snowmaking at the games by half.
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 data Falk did manage to obtain was “shocking”, he says. SkiStar, which runs five ski areas in Sweden, used about 5bn litres of water for snowmaking during the 2019-20 season, enough to fill 27m bathtubs. Snowmaking is also inefficient. Another study, conducted by the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research in Davos, Switzerland, found that as much as 40% of the water that goes into snow machines may be lost through leakage, evaporation or because artificial flakes blow away from the piste they’re supposed to land on.
In a country like Sweden, strewn with rivers and lakes, this doesn’t matter much. Elsewhere the consequences can be stark. Ski resorts usually claim that they consume only a tiny fraction of regional water reserves, but such figures can be deceptive, says hydrologist Carmen de Jong. “In France they say, oh, it’s 0.5% of the Rhone’s water resources. But the impact is not regional, it’s local.” Snowmaking may use 80% of the water from river basins near ski runs. In 2018, the head of the Rhone’s regional water agency told Le Monde that “some municipalities ask residents to limit their showers in favour of snow canons.”
The water situation in Beijing is dramatically worse than in Europe. The region is so arid – and so highly populated, industrialised and intensively farmed – that over the past two decades the Chinese government has undertaken the largest water-diversion project in history to ferry water from the Yangzi river, over a thousand kilometres away, to the capital. The South-North Diversion pipeline, which cost almost $80bn and displaced 330,000 people to make way for dams and reservoirs, now supplies two-thirds of Beijing’s tap water. But the region is still parched.
In the hillsides outside Beijing, water is as scarce as it is in South Sudan
According to a widely used indicator of water scarcity, any place with less than 1,700 cubic metres of water per person per year is considered water stressed. At Yanqing, host to many of the Beijing Olympic events, that figure is currently 643 – which means it has as little water as Ethiopia and South Sudan. The Chinese have built dedicated snowmaking ponds to serve snow cannons, but the ponds at Yanqing can hold only 180,000 cubic metres, and organisers estimate that they’ll need five times that amount. The shortfall will be drawn from reservoirs that supply households and farms nearby. “The worst-case scenario would be that local villages don’t have enough water during the daytime,” de Jong says.
At the mayor of Beijing’s behest, Martikainen set up test sites near the skiing venue in Yanqing. In the winter of 2017, he made about 12,000 cubic metres of snow and collected it in a pile ten metres high. Then he covered the tower and left it over the hot, dry summer, as temperatures climbed to 40℃. When he went back in September, he climbed a ladder and uncovered a patch. The snow was still there, shining white.
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. “Maybe the idea of ecological snow was not their priority,” Martikainen said, “or maybe they didn’t trust the idea of storing snow. I don’t know. But they need it because water is so important. The thinking was very conservative.”
Skiing will only make northern China’s water scarcity worse in the coming years. Academics at Beijing’s Minzu University have modelled future water consumption at Chongli, another resort close to Beijing where some Olympic skiing events will take place. They estimate that, within five years, the number of visitors to the resort will have increased so much that Chongli will require a third more water by next season. “You can’t think just about the next five years,” Martikainen said. “You have to think about the next 50.”
Although snow recycling has yet to catch on in China, it’s getting ever more popular in Europe, including at Levi. The International Ski Federation chose Levi to open the slalom season because it assumed that, unlike the Alps or the Rockies, Finnish Lapland could guarantee snow in November. Nature proved them wrong. The race was cancelled in 2007, 2011 and 2015 when winter arrived too late and it was too warm to make snow. Each cancellation cost the ski facility about €5m ($5.6m) in revenue.
Martikainen started working at Levi in 2017, storing snow on the fells to guarantee enough of it for the competition. On race day, he and I joined the spectators near the finish line. Around 70% of the slope in front of us was covered in recycled snow. The previous year, all of it had been.
A giant screen relayed footage from the top of the course. Mikaela Shiffrin – the best slalom skier in the world and favourite to win the event in Beijing – was standing on the piste with her eyes closed. Weaving her head as she visualised the course, she looked like she was enjoying a silent disco.
We were part of a crowd of 4,000 well-lubricated ski fans, including three hardy men in Viking helmets enjoying a pop-up hot-tub. Over 200m others were tuning in on TV. The race marked not just the beginning of the professional calendar but also the start of winter in Finland. Everyone was out to celebrate.
At 11am sharp, the first skier appeared over the crest of the final descent, her head still, her legs swinging beneath her like a pendulum as she threaded her way between tightly spaced blue and red poles. When she dipped her head across the line a great cheer went up, along with a loud rumble of gloved hands clapping. Winter was clinging on. ■
Simon Willis is a freelance writer
SNOWFLAKE PHOTOGRAPHS: DON KOMARECHKA
ADDITIONAL IMAGES: GILLES SABRIE, ALTA SKI AREA