Michigan Tech’s (Houghton) ASME student chapter gathered 30 strong on the softball field and began to roll snow in hopes of getting back into the Guinness Book of World Records. It took 2.5 hours to create the massive snowball with a circumference of 32.94 ft. Estimates were that it weighed in the neighborhood of 3-4 tons, said Parshwa Patwa, who led the effort. The weather helped. “The day we broke the record was the nicest day in the past two weeks,” said Patwa.
The snow was so warm and sticky that the students did not need to contact firefighters to compact the snow with more water, as they did in 2006, when they previously held the record. Licensed surveyors Steven Hein and Casey Storm verified the snowball’s size, and Patwa, a third-year mechanical engineering major, captured the entire event on a two-hour video.
Guinness verified the record, and Patwa received the official certificate in September 2013. In retrospect, rolling an enormous snowball seems like an unusual undertaking for someone from Gujaret, India, where summer temperatures can soar to over 120° and snow is unheard of, but Patwa said that never crossed his mind. “The reason we did it is because the award was taken away, and we wanted to get it back to Michigan Tech,” he said. “We cannot just lose stuff.”
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