Why is ice clear and snow white?

If you were to look closely at your TV screen displaying a white surface, you would see that the image is actually composed of many very small green, red and blue dots. But because they’re too small for your eye to resolve at normal distance, they appear white. Snow does the same thing: all of those little ice crystals take the various colors of light that strike them and refract them into a swarm of tiny points of color. The eye can’t pick out those individual points, so it averages them into white. If you magnify an individual snowflake, you can see that it is indeed transparent.

Can’t really add anything to that. GA @Harp, and thanx for single-handedly shutting down the thread with just one answer! ; )

The snow includes a lot of air in its mass to enable the effects that @Harp describes so well. As the water molecules compress during cooling they form into ice, which is also denser than snow because most of the air has been squeezed out.

@Harp That picture is pretty!

Never mind.