As the issue of climate change looms across the globe, students may be seeing early effects of it on campus.
A Jan. 10 study from researchers at Dartmouth College detailed how snowpacks throughout the New England region have significantly decreased over the past few decades. Researchers noted actions by humans were likely the culprit when analyzing the decline in snowpack.
Joe Britton, supervisor for grounds, who has been at the college for over 15 years, said a lot has changed over his tenure.
“In the last three or four years, the winters have absolutely been different,” Britton said. “We’re seeing more icing events than snow, we’re seeing a lot more snow turning to rain events.”
Britton said the prevalence of ice and freezing rain rather than snow makes the grounds team’s job more difficult.
“We do use more salt to get through it and make it safer for the students to be able to get around,” Britton said.
The college uses a stockpile of road salt owned by the City of Keene, Britton said. In 2023, the college deployed 109 tons of salt. Britton said comparatively, the city uses about 200 tons following a single weather event. With the city’s salt numbers dwarfing the college’s, they are able to operate under a handshake agreement, Britton said.
“End of the year I give them my salt totals and we just pay the city for whatever we use,” Britton said.
According to HowStuffWorks, road salt is used in icing events because it lowers the freezing point of water through freezing point depression, making it more difficult for ice to form or stay on roads and walkways.
“I’d honestly rather a foot of snow than an inch of ice [or] freezing rain just because the amount of material we have to put out to get rid of it,” Britton said.
Another effect of climate change beginning to set in is the timing of seasons being thrown off in a phenomenon called ‘season creep.’
Season creep entails shorter and milder winters paired with earlier springs and later falls, according to Climate Signals.
Britton said he has seen some shift in terms of when winter weather events occur, often toward the latter half of the season.
“It’s more late-season for sure, traditionally we’ve had some pretty nasty snow storms at the end of February and [beginning] of March,” Britton said.
In terms of grounds work though, Britton said late-arriving winter weather is better than an event in December because the snow or ice will melt faster closer to the onset of spring.
One day-to-day effect students see in terms of weather is the use of curtailed operations which causes class cancelation and non-essential campus services to cease operation. In the spring semester, there have already been a couple of instances of curtailed operations.
“My biggest … ‘Oh s**t’ storm this year was … we came in, it was only like two or three inches it wasn’t a lot, and we plowed and the ground temp was cold enough and it was moist enough where it just froze,” Britton said.
Britton noted it ended up fine because the team was already operating under a delay.
“I can’t say enough how much it’s changed over the last 15 years … I remember probably 15 years ago it snowed every weekend, we had three nor’easters and it got to the point where we didn’t have room to put snow … [now] we’re going to come in and rake leaves and do lawn work in the last week of February,” Britton said.
Nathan Hope can be contacted at
nhope@kscequinox.com
