An igloo is more than just a house made of snow, it’s a culmination of Inuit survival skills and wisdom. Made of snow bricks that melt into ice, the igloo uses scientific principles to maintain its internal temperature, providing warmth in the harsh conditions of the polar regions.
When you think of Inuit (Eskimos), one of the first things that comes to mind is an igloo. The igloo is the quintessential Inuit dwelling, a structure that embodies their wisdom for surviving in the extreme cold. But an igloo isn’t just a house made of snow. In fact, the term igloo is a generic term for a wide variety of dwellings, and the Inuit used a variety of materials to build their homes, including snow, as well as tents made of wood or leather. However, as snow houses attracted the attention of outsiders, the term igloo gradually came to refer only to houses made of snow.
While an igloo may look like it’s just snow cut into bricks and stacked in a hemispherical shape, there’s a surprising scientific principle behind it. First, the snow bricks used to build an igloo are more than just a building material. Snow contains a lot of air, which makes it a great insulator that helps maintain the temperature inside the igloo. You might be wondering how a house made of snow turns into an ice house. The secret lies in the igloo’s heating system.
After building the igloo, the Inuit build a fire inside the igloo to raise the temperature inside. During this process, the snow melts slightly and fills the gaps in the walls, and then they open the doorway to let the water freeze again. Repeating this process will turn the snow brick house into an increasingly solid ice house. The air in the snow is trapped in the ice instead of escaping, giving the igloo its distinctive cloudy appearance instead of a clear ice house. This is because light hits the air bubbles in the ice and scatters them.
The temperature inside an igloo is much warmer than outside. One of the reasons for this is that the igloo receives more solar energy per unit area than the ground. It’s the same way that the equatorial regions receive more sunlight than the polar regions. Some scientists also explain that igloos keep warm by a similar principle to the greenhouse effect. The radiant energy that comes to Earth from the sun consists of short waves of ultraviolet and visible light, but when the Earth radiates heat to the outside, it does so as long waves in the infrared region. These long waves are absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere, keeping the Earth’s temperature constant, which is known as the greenhouse effect. In an igloo, the icy walls block these radiation waves, keeping the interior warm.
The Inuit have a unique way of warming up their igloos when it’s cold inside: they sprinkle water on the floor. Unlike watering your yard in the summer to cool it down, water sprinkled on the floor of an igloo soon freezes and releases heat. This raises the temperature of the room. In this case, it’s more effective to use hot water than cold water, as hot water evaporates faster due to its higher temperature, and as a result, it turns to ice faster. This process makes the interior of the igloo warmer.
Did the Inuit understand the scientific principles of melting, solidification, radiation, and vaporization when they built their igloos? Probably not, they did not know these principles in theory. But through years of experience and wisdom, the Inuit learned to build structures out of snow and heat them with water without using glue. An igloo is more than just a house. It’s a way of life for the Inuit, a culmination of their survival skills that they developed to survive in extreme conditions.
Today, the igloo is more than just a traditional dwelling, it’s an important cultural icon that symbolizes life in the polar regions. The wisdom of the Inuit continues to inspire the modern world, and their igloos remain a marvelous structure where science and tradition meet.
