Why Are Clouds White

Artistic Wonderland exists in Middle of Nowhere, Minn.

FRANCONIA, Minn. — On the way to somewhere else, sometimes you can find something much bigger.

Last week I was driving out of Minneapolis on Route 8 toward the Wisconsin border. Appointments had fallen through. The deep sky was filled with big white clouds that flutter out of Duluth like bedsheets in a dim bordello. I was all kinds of lost.

Suddenly on the right I saw strange sculptures in a cornfield.

A stucco green lizard. A play station made of colorful bird houses, swings, benches and sliding boards. A wood barn suspended mid-air.

I had to stop.

The Franconia Sculpture Park is 20 acres that exhibit 85 rotating sculptures. It literally is in the middle of nowhere, about three miles west of the Wisconsin border and the St. Croix Falls. The park sits in the former logging community of Franconia Township. I drove through a small town called Chisago City. (Just like in the City of Chicago, I endured road construction.)

The 15-year-old park consists of small iron sculptures, big industrial jobs, inflatable pieces and environmental works. Artists and interns live on-site in an eight-bedroom, 31/2 bathroom farmhouse with a wandering wrap-around veranda. During my visit, a handful of kids ran to the 37-foot-tall play station made by Clear Lake, Wis., artist Bridget Beck.

I found sculpture artist Araan Schmidt working with canvas-coated green tubing reclaimed from a Minneapolis factory. The 29-year-old Schmidt was listening to the indy rock band the Faint and singer/songwriter M. Ward on a huge boom box. (I love M. Ward and that took me somewhere else.)

“The unique thing about this sculpture park is that all works are created on-site, and made from materials in the area,” said Schmidt. “I’m working with tubes from Harris Machinery in Minneapolis. They used to make these tubes as ventilation heating ducts for the Korean War. I stumbled upon a warehouse filled with these things. It was an opportunity for me to push the scale of my work.”

Schmidt will bundle up the tubes, suspend them in the air and bind them together with cables. They will be supported by a steel structure that will extend the work vertically and horizontally. “It could wind up 100 feet wide to 50 feet tall,” said Schmidt, whose father, Julius, taught sculpture for 30 years at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. “That’s part of the deal here. Your sculptures have to be built to last. And climbed on.

Why are clouds white?

Esther Inglis-Arkell — Water is clear. The sky is blue. So why are clouds white? And if regular clouds are white, why are rain clouds gray?

On sunny days, at picnics, we relax on the sweet-smelling grass, look up at the clouds and idly wonder if they all look like skeletal hands reaching down to pluck us from the earth (or if that's just us). A better question to ponder would be why we can see them at all. Water droplets are clear – although en masse they do have a bluish tinge, and the sky above is blue. Blue against blue doesn't suddenly turn white, and neither does clear against blue. Whether or not there are clouds in the sky should be a mystery. They should be invisible, instead of an amorphous white mass that always seems to resemble the last person to turn us down for a date. Twice.

Visible light comes at us in many different wavelengths, each corresponding to a slightly different color. When all the wavelengths combine, they show up as white light. White light may be a combination of wavelengths, but it's not a permanent combination of them. Under certain circumstances, wavelengths can be separated out. For example, earth's atmosphere tends to scatter blue light, while letting the other wavelengths of light pass through in a straight line. Because of this, the sky is blue – made up of diffuse, scattered light – while the sunlight that falls around us tends to be more golden, because the blue wavelengths of light have been filtered out. That's called Rayleigh scattering.

Clouds also scatter light. Unlike oxygen and nitrogen molecules, which are picky about which kind of light they scatter, larger water droplets scatter all kinds of light in all directions. This is called Mie Scattering. When we look up at clouds, we see red light, blue light, yellow and orange and green light, all coming at us. We can't see the individual colors, though, because since they're all coming at our eye from the same place. Together, they all combine - Power Ranger style - to make white light. That's what hits our eyes, and makes us perceive clouds as white.

Or that's what doesn't hit our eyes, in the case of rainclouds.

While harmless, decorative clouds are glowing white, clouds that mean business slide down into the gray scale and even develop black streaks. This can be confusing. No matter how much white light is scattered, it's still white light.

There's one way to turn white, or any color, into black: turn off the lights. Mie Scattering scatters light in all directions. Rainclouds tend to be both wider and taller than regular clouds. The more layers of water droplets that light has to pass through, the more likely the droplets are to send that light flying right back where it came from while shouting, ‘Shove that up your space hole!' Instead of filtering out blue light, high, dense clouds filter out all light. That makes them darker and darker when they're seen from the ground.

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