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Photos show staggering snow pile-ups in Canada after historic weekend blizzard

You've never seen anything like this before.

Adam Rosenberg

on January 19, 2020

Photos show staggering snow pile-ups in Canada after historic weekend blizzard

a whole lot of snow fell in newfoundland, canada Credit: Andrew Vaughan / AP / Shutterstock

It's been a long, cold weekend of hunkering down for people living in eastern Canada.

A powerful blizzard dumped a record-shattering amount of snow on the province of Newfoundland across Friday and Saturday. After moving through the northeastern U.S. at the end of the week, it developed into a powerful weather event known as a "bomb cyclone."

Meteorologists use that term to describe a kind of rapidly strengthening storm that occurs when the weather event's minimum central pressure drops by at least 24 millibars in a 24-hour period. That process of rapid intensification – "bombogenesis," as it's called – is where the "bomb cyclone" name comes from.

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With this latest storm, the measured central air pressure hit 954 millibars on early Saturday morning. This amounted to a 54 millibar drop in less than 48 hours (h/t The Weather Channel). It turned into a powerful storm, with the same report pointing out that the one-day snow total in the Newfoundland city of St. John's reached 35 inches, which is close to the average snowfall the city sees across the entire month of January.

This was a bad one. It's not every day you see a professional meteorologist making a claim like this. He wasn't the only one.

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Unless you live in a very specific kind of location, you've probably never seen snowfall like this. Photos are the best way to truly grasp what Canadians are dealing with as they work now to dig themselves out, and social media has plenty to show you.

This is some wild stuff, folks.

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Adam Rosenberg

Adam Rosenberg is a Senior Games Reporter for Mashable, where he plays all the games. Every single one. From AAA blockbusters to indie darlings to mobile favorites and browser-based oddities, he consumes as much as he can, whenever he can.Adam brings more than a decade of experience working in the space to the Mashable Games team. He previously headed up all games coverage at Digital Trends, and prior to that was a long-time, full-time freelancer, writing for a diverse lineup of outlets that includes Rolling Stone, MTV, G4, Joystiq, IGN, Official Xbox Magazine, EGM, 1UP, UGO and others.Born and raised in the beautiful suburbs of New York, Adam has spent his life in and around the city. He's a New York University graduate with a double major in Journalism and Cinema Studios. He's also a certified audio engineer. Currently, Adam resides in Crown Heights with his dog and his partner's two cats. He's a lover of fine food, adorable animals, video games, all things geeky and shiny gadgets.