system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why is snow white and ice clear?

Sometimes it 'snows' ice too. What's the difference between snow and ice?
gpt
Snow is made up of many tiny pieces of clear ice, with air in between the crystals. This causes light to bend in every direction like it has no idea what it is doing. It does this to all colors of light about equally, so the light that comes back to your eyes appears white. It is roughly the same reason why scratches in glass are easily visible when they are large, because they have lots of edges to bend light, which is even more apparent in snow flakes given their complex shapes. A solid block of ice doesn't have many places for light to bend like a pile of snow, and light really only bends in a block of ice when it goes into or exits the block. In this way you can think of snow as a giant pile of really tiny, beat up, blocks of ice.