From Zhangjiakou, Olympic venue, the news arrived this Saturday: a beautiful snowfall had finally fallen. Another has arrived this Sunday in Beijing. In times of global warming, the appearance of the main ingredient of some Winter Olympic Games. Artificial snow has solved the problem in recent decades, but experts warn that it will not be an eternal solution.
The lack of snow has already tormented the organizers of Innsbruck in 1964. The hot winds on the eve had melted it and Austrian soldiers had to carry 20,000 cubic meters of ice up the mountains to save them. Technology has eased the process. The artificial snow broke into Lake Placid en 1980 and its relevance has grown unabated. It concentrated 80% of the total snow in Sochi 2014 (Russia), the 90% in Pyeongchang 2018 (South Korea) and in Beijing has reached 99%.
Beijing this week became the first city in the world to host the Summer and Winter Olympics. Many were surprised when it was chosen as the venue for the latter: are they feasible without snow? Beijing’s winters are demanding but snowfalls are only sporadic because the capital suffers from the northern dry climate in contrast to the southern humidity. The Pekingese have 120,000 liters of water per year ‘per capita’, hardly a twenty part of the national average, and well below the bar of 1.7 million liters where the UN sets aquifer sufficiency. The United States exceeds eight million.
Italy as a reference
Beijing did the math. He needed 1.2 million cubic meters to cover the 800,000 square meters of the competition area and looked towards Italy. From there, after paying 60 million dollars, he imported the 300 cannons that since November have painted the arid mountains of Zhangjiakou y YanqingOlympic venues. The difference between artificial and natural snow is not insignificant. The first allows a choice a la carte, harder in alpine jumps and softer in freestyle exercises. It also mediates the preparation of athletes for the event of their lives because they will have to adjust their exercises to a more or less slippery surface.
Some athletes have warned that their greater firmness and speed to become ice multiplies injuries. There is no doubt that it lacks the romanticism of nature and worries the environmentalist union because it requires huge amounts of water and electricity. LThe criticisms have been answered by the authorities, who have promised a “green” Gamesalluding to the tens of thousands of trees planted to absorb emissions and the renewable energy sources, mainly solar and wind, installed at the venues.
The water debate
There is the matter of water. To cover the Olympic venues with snow, 185 million liters have been needed, which seems like a lot in an area of chronic scarcity. Beijing has minimized the environmental impact and denied that they are going to strangle its canals. The bulk, he has clarified, will come from the rain. The artificial snow, he adds, will be recycled for agricultural and tourist uses. Some experts, however, warn that a portion of the snow released by the cannons evaporates before crystallizing. Up to 35% of the volume would be lost, according to Swiss researchers Thomas Grunewald and Fabian Wolfsperger, although that water would feed at least the underground reserves.
The debate about the virtues and defects of artificial snow for sports or the ecosystem is sterile if it comes to saving the Winter Games. They will be with her or they will not be. Only one of the 21 venues that have hosted them, the Japanese Sapporo, In 2080 they will have sufficient temperatures and rainfall to repeat if the level of greenhouse gas emissions continues. The solution lies in meeting the objectives of the 2015 Paris Agreement signed by 200 countries in 2015. The planet has many things at stake, and among them, Winter Olympic Games, because artificial snow also requires minimum temperatures to prevent its rapid conversion into water. The only alternative, if necessary, will be indoor ski resorts like the one in Dubai, raised thousands of kilometers from icy peaks.
