Rising from the cooling towers of an abandoned steel mill sits Shougang Park, the venue for Big Air freestyle skiing and snowboarding events in the Beijing Winter Olympics. Nestled in the heart of downtown Beijing, the site of China's first state-owned steel mill no longer fabricates steel, but manufactures snow instead — crucial for a venue where there is little natural snowfall.
Nearly 100 percent of the snow at the 2022 Winter Olympics is artificial, but the move toward fake snow to provide for winter sports is not new. The shift is part of a decades-long trend, for which human-influenced climate change is to blame. Since 1950, February temperatures in the last 19 cities to host the Winter Olympics have increased by a mean of 4.8º Fahrenheit, according to an analysis by Climate Central. In the same period, Beijing warmed by an average of 9º F.
