The day it snowed in Sydney and other weird weather events

ONE hundred and eighty years ago today Sydneysiders woke up to a light blanket of white from the mountains almost to the sea. Although the Blue Mountains still sees regular falls, the event has not repeated on the coast.

Sydney as it looked in 1836, the year snow covered the city on June 28.

SYDNEY is currently shivering under a blast of winds from the Antarctic and snow is falling in the Blue Mountains. But spare a thought for Sydneysiders 180 years ago today, who woke to see snow on streets across the city.

There had been rain overnight but by 7am on June 28, 1836, the rain had turned to snow, with reports it was an inch (2.5cm) deep in some places, gathering on the city’s roofs and awnings. Children tried to make snowmen and had snowball fights. But the snow didn’t last long; it melted by noon.

It was one of the strangest episodes of weather in Sydney on record. A light snowfall at around the same time the following year made some people wonder if it was some kind of pattern but despite reports of snow falling in Sydney several times since, including a snowdrift at Wynyard during a cold snap in 1941, there has never been a carpet of snow quite like it was in 1836.

While snow in Sydney seems unusual, it is not the strangest place on Earth where the ground has been given a dusting of white.

The lowlands of the Sahara Desert in southern Algeria saw snow in February 1979. The storm lasted half an hour and the snow quickly melted. Although snow falls often on some mountains in the Sahara region, this was the first time in recorded history that the lower areas turned white. Another cold snap in 2012 saw heavy snowfall again on the desert across Algeria and Mali.

Jem Sullivan, 9, of Blackheath, enjoys the snow that fell in the Blue Mountains town last year. Picture: Matthew Sullivan

Snow falls have been recorded in the desert of Monument Valley, Utah.

However, since ancient times we have marvelled at peculiar episodes of unexpected or unusual weather. Some people believe that the ancient biblical tale of God sending 10 plagues upon the Egyptians, to help Moses free the Hebrews from captivity, was inspired by actual unusual cataclysmic weather and environmental events. While many believe the story as literal truth, scientists and archaeologists say that there are rare but natural phenomena that could have afflicted the Egyptians and given rise to the stories, albeit with some embellishments and additions.

The “rivers turning to blood” has been explained as the result of an algal bloom. It has a modern parallel in rains that fell in Kerala, southwest India, in 2001, which were red to reddish brown. According to an Indian government report, the red colour came from a large amount of “spores of a lichen-forming alga belonging to the genus Trentepohlia”. Scientists are still trying to work out exactly how the spores got into the rain clouds in the first place.

Dee Why beach is covered in red dust from the storm in 2009.

Sydney saw its skies turn blood red back on September 22, 2009, when around five million tonnes of soil from drought-affected far western NSW was swept up by winds and delivered hundreds of kilometres across the state. The dust storm set off fire alarms, affected asthma sufferers and caused transport chaos, with flights and ferry services cancelled. It took two days for the dust to dissipate.

Sometimes even larger objects have been sucked into the sky to be dumped as rain. For centuries all around the world people have reported animals “raining from the sky”. Ancient Greek writer Athenaeus, in the second century AD, wrote about areas in what is today Macedonia where “frogs rained down in such numbers that their homes were filled with the creatures”. While ancient accounts may have been exaggerated in the retelling, there have been many more recent accounts of animal rain.

Fish rained from the sky in Lajamanu, Northern Territory, in 2010.

In 1953 in Algiers, hundreds of thousands of snails rained down on the country. In 2010, the Northern Territory town of Lajamanu reported a rain of thousands of tiny white fish, possibly spangled perch, that were still alive when they hit they ground. Locals said there had been similar fishy downpours in 1974 and 2004. A mysterious rain of thousands of dead birds darkened skies in Arkansas, Louisiana and Sweden in January 2011.

Scientists are not absolutely sure how this happens, since it is a difficult phenomenon to observe at all stages, but it is likely the cause is a tornado that sucks up water from a pond and then dumps it as rain somewhere else.

Originally published as The day it snowed in Sydney and other weird weather events