It’s not snowy here, but it certainly feels like winter: we’ve had a winter cold circulating through the house since the holidays. The subnivium, which I first wrote about in 2013, sounds very appealing right now as a refuge from all that the season brings.
When I think about winter, I mostly think about all the fun things that take place on the snow’s surface. Or all the fun things that take place inside: hot chocolate, eating, reading by the fire. Once spring comes, when the world outside is buzzing (and boing-ing), there’s no excuse to stay inside with a good book.
I’m not the only one who needs a winter retreat. In snow-covered spots food can be scarce; the wind-chilled open air is brutal. But for creatures that aren’t able to curl up with cocoa, the snow itself forms the insulation for a shelter under the snow.
This below-snow retreat is such a wintertime ecological haven—for everything from freeze-resistant invertebrates that can supercool their own bodies to martens and weasels that stalk prey and snooze in this space–that a paper in this month’s Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment proposes that it should get its own designation: the subnivium. Jonathan Pauli and Benjamin Zuckerberg at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and their colleagues have gotten interested in the dynamics of this sub-snow world—and what will happen to it as winters warm up.
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