Last weekend, Hanover accumulated 18 inches of snow, WMUR reported. The snowy start to the spring term follows a winter of warm weather and minimal snowfall that disrupted Dartmouth’s winter traditions.
In February, the Winter Carnival Council canceled its annual Polar Bear Swim and ice sculpture competition because of high temperatures, according to Student Involvement director David Pack.
Global warming spurred the change, according to Alexander Gottlieb, a fifth-year PhD candidate in the ecology, evolution, environment and society program at the Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies. Gottlieb said he co-authored a paper in 2022 examining human influence on snowpack in the Northern Hemisphere with climate model simulations.
“Winters like this winter in Hanover are going to be the norm going forward,” Gottlieb said. “What climate change is doing is changing the odds of certain things happening. It’s really stacking the deck against cold and snowy winters, but that’s not to say that you can’t get all of the ingredients to line up for something like a really big snowstorm — it’s just going to become increasingly less likely.”
Adapting to a new climate reality is an “emerging conversation” among students and the College administration, according to Pack. In recent years, the Winter Carnival Council has added fewer “weather-dependent activities” and may adapt popular events to be more weather-resilient in the future, he said.
According to Gottlieb, Hanover’s location makes it particularly susceptible to the effects of global warming.
“Our winters are cold, but they’re not that cold on average, just a couple of degrees below the freezing point,” he said. “They are incredibly sensitive to even a small amount of warming. Just the degree or so of winter warming that we’ve experienced over recent decades can easily wipe out half of your snowpack and shorten your snow season by two weeks.”
Freshmen were disappointed that they were unable to experience some of the College’s wintertime traditions, according to past reporting by The Dartmouth.
“When it doesn’t feel like winter, it’s harder for people to get in the mood for Winter Carnival, particularly for the pieces that are about celebrating the outdoors,” Pack said.
In addition to campus-wide traditions, low snowfall disrupted winter sports. According to team captain John DeForest ’25, Club Nordic skiers took up jogging and roller blading on skis in response to poor skiing conditions. He added that Club Nordic had a hard time managing training for newer skiers.
“[T]he snowpack is really icy a lot of the time,” DeForest said. “It’s not very beginner friendly — even for advanced skiers, skiing on ice is really hard. This year, and especially last year, we couldn’t get beginner lessons going for a while.”
According to DeForest, the weather also forced race cancellations — a problem for the team, since races that get rescheduled are often moved farther away from Hanover, making them more expensive and less accessible to students. Despite these disappointments, DeForest said the team maintained an “optimistic” attitude.
The golf course, for instance, was only without snow for a week and a half, while the Oak Hill Outdoor Center “got their snowmaking up and running pretty quickly,” DeForest said.
According to DeForest, Club Nordic is also taking advantage of the snowstorm last Saturday. He said the team held a rare spring practice on Monday.
The snowstorm at the beginning of spring is partially a product of warmer weather, Gottlieb said.
“A warmer atmosphere can just hold more moisture,” he said. “If you have that moisture coming in and it just so happens that it’s cold enough, you actually have the potential for these really big, heavy snowstorms.”
Evan Kaye ’25 said students could not enjoy the outdoors in the way they used to because of changing weather.
“There’s sort of this ideal of Hanover as a really wintry, fun place with snow everywhere,” he said. “We’re really not seeing that very much at all these days. It’s sort of like we’re getting snow when we don’t really want it and we don’t get snow when we do want it, and that’s pretty frustrating.”
Evan Kaye ’25 has published cartoons in The Dartmouth.
