In a historic first, the entire 2022 Winter Olympics Games are being held on artificial snow.
Most outdoor events in 2022 are taking place in Zhangjiakou, 160km outside of Beijing.
The climate in Zhangjiakou is cold but dry. The area only experiences on average 7.9mm of precipitation each winter.
Therefore, this year there will be more than 100 snow generators and 300 snow-cannons working flat out to cover the ski slopes. They will create more than 1.2 million cubic metres of powder for athletes in outdoor events.
This isn’t the first Olympics where fake snow has been used.
In 1964, Austrian soldiers hauled 20,000 cubic metres of ice blocks to the slopes of Innsbruck after a dry wind melted the snow on the slopes ahead of the Winter Olympics.
In 1980, snow machines were used at Lake Placid, New York, to blow water droplets into the air to freeze.
The move has caused a number of environmental groups to question the decision to hold the games in this location. A report estimated China will need 49 million gallons of water to create the required fake snow for the Olympics. This is around the same amount of water as 800 Olympic sized swimming pools.
