How Cheetos in the Wild Went From Hero to Villain
snowball effect: a small event or action that causes a series of bigger events, making the situation grow quickly and sometimes uncontrollably
In 2011, after 86 days exploring the South Pole, Norwegian explorer Aleksander Gamme found a bag of supplies buried in the snow. A video of his triumphant screams after finding a bag of cheesy snacks quickly went viral on social media.
In 2024, the discovery of a bag of similar snacks in Carlsbad Caverns provoked the opposite reaction. The Cheetos were dropped in the national park cave by a tourist and created a snowball effect. Because of the humidity, mold started to grow. Soon, insects like crickets and spiders began to eat the food and spread the fungus through the cave. Carlsbad Caverns is a delicate ecosystem. It is a bit larger than the entire city of Paris and is home to hundreds of thousands of bats. On social media, the park staff warned visitors to be careful. They said, “At the scale of human perspective, a spilled snack bag may seem trivial, but to the life of the cave it can be world changing.”
Watch the videos below to see how reactions to Cheetos differed between the South Pole and Carlsbad Caverns.
Sample sentences
The company’s small financial mistake created a snowball effect that led to massive debt within a year.
A single bad decision can sometimes have a snowball effect, causing problems you didn’t expect.
The snowball effect of rumors spread through the school, turning a simple misunderstanding into a big drama.
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US cave system’s bats and insects face existential threat: discarded Cheetos