At the Winter Olympics, athletes race down immaculate white slopes. The snow looks perfect. But it is largely manufactured.
In Italy, where rising temperatures and declining snowfall were felt earlier than in other Alpine regions, technological fixes began in the 1990s. Today, reliance on artificial snow is widespread: around 95% of Italian ski resorts use snowmaking, and more than 70% of slopes are covered by artificial snow during the season.
Modern snowmaking uses a large fan-like “snow canon” to spray tiny droplets of water into cold air, where they freeze before landing on the ground. Vehicles known as piste bashers (in Europe) or snowcats (in North America) then compress and groom that new snow until it forms a more stable base. The process does not rely on chemical additives. It has become so effective that it can now guarantee competition-grade conditions even when natural snowfall is increasingly unreliable.
