Accumulating Snow

The most impressive snowfall timelapses on the web

Winter is a time for hunkering down in fr0nt of a warm fire while the snow piles up outside, but most parts of the world rarely get to experience the joy of seeing a snowstorm gradually cover the outside world in a thick, white, blanket that muffles every sound.

So here’s a selection of timelapses that show the gradual accumulation of snow. For best results, put on this Spotify playlist, maximise each video to full screen, and then hunker down in front of your warm laptop with a hot drink.

This video was captured on a GoPro camera, and shows more than thirty centimetres of snow piling up over the course of twelve hours on 12 February 2014.

This timelapse was shot in Fayetteville in north-west Arkansas, between 3am and noon on 9 February 2011. The storm dropped temperatures twenty-five degrees below normal for that time of year.

This snowscape was shot in the city of Baltimore in Maryland, where more than half a metre of snow fell on 4/5 April 2010, burying cars and homes under a thick, white blanket.

In this timelapse, shot just before Christmas, forty centimetres of snow cover a neighbourhood in just thirty-six hours.

In the Italian Alps, things get rather more spectacular. Here, in Piemonte, Maurizio Basaletti captured this timelapse of snow falling over fifty-five hours in 2010. Don’t miss the moment at 1:40 or so when the skies finally clear.

This is one of our favourites in the list, shot from inside a fish tank near Silver Lake, New Hampshire on 8-9 February 2013. A total of about 45cm of snow fell over the course of about fifteen hours. The tape marks on the stick are at two-inch intervals.

This is another one from Sam Graves on 3 September 2013. He used an iPhone 4S to capture this lovely timelapse. “The wind really started blowing pretty heavily around mid-day and created a lot of melted snow/water droplets on the window, causing the camera’s auto-focus to change for about 20 seconds (several hours real time),” he says. “Fortunately, most of it evaporated rather quickly and the auto-focus shifted back to the intended scene.”

In this timelapse, you’ll see a car slowly getting buried during a blizzard in the United States on 9 February 2013. The best bit is at the end, when the family that own the car go dig it out.

Finally, this timelapse shows the historic blizzard that hit the North-East of the United States in February 2013. After a slow start things get insane, unfortunately obscured at the end by the camera itself getting coated with snow. Ah well.

If you’ve shot an amazing timelapse of snow accumulating, we want to hear about it. Drop a link to in the further reading section below.

Looking Up is a collection on Medium that offers a home to those obsessed with the world above our heads. It’s curated by @duncangeere. If you enjoyed this article, please click the “recommend” button below, and if you want more, then click the “follow” button to make sure you don’t miss anything in the future. You can also ‘Like’ the collection on Facebook.