The WTF Files: Black Snow?

Black snow? WTF? Black snow has recently fallen in Russia. Officials say it's "cause for alarm." Ya think? Interviews with alarmed locals say that the photos don't do justice to the true color since the Sun is shining in most of the images, and that the color is absolutely black.
 Most of the photos look like regular snow, only black. This looks like some sort of polymer. This was the gnarliest photo I could find so naturally I started out with it. There's definitely something besides regular snow going on here. If I lived there what would concern me most is that all that shit would've been suspended in the atmosphere prior to the snowfall bringing it down, and I'd been breathing it for who knows how long. This is wrong, man. Frank Zappa once warned us not to eat yellow snow (because that's where the Huskies go), but nothing could have prepared anyone for this. I'd go beyond "alarming" and add "depressing."

Here's a photo that shows the true color. This looks like a freshly-tarred street. I bet it would burn. If you do an image search you'll see tons of pics from cities, forests, fields and such so it appears to be over a widespread area. That means that there was a whole lot of something in the air. A hell of a whole lot actually. The more I look at these images as I write this the more I wonder how they're even calling it snow at all. Well, some sort of crazy red precipitation has been falling occasionally in China and other places and they're calling that snow, so why not black snow I guess.
 I'd say it was caused by a volcano, although I don't think they know the reason yet. I haven't finished reading any of the articles I started because this is so batshit-crazy that I had to go ahead and blog about it, but I'll definitely be looking into this more. There are satellite charts that show various particulate counts of sulfur dioxide, co2, carbon monoxide and other things, and maybe there's something on one of those. Still I don't see how volcanic ash or anything else for that matter could blend so thoroughly with the "snow" or whatever the hell it is. This snow looks like it was meant to be black. You'd think that even with huge amounts of ash it'd still only color the snow here and there. This is mind-boggling.
 I hope this doesn't sound racist but I suppose you could build some African-American snowmen. That would be absolutely fantastic and it's what I'd do, but only with the help one one of my black friends- D, Kent, Bruce, Bernard, Joe, Hosier, Duck, Rod or Rodney or any of my other brethren-buds, whom I guarantee would think it was hilarious. Man I can just see it now...OMG. In all sincerity though, seeing something like this juuuust might get me wonderin' if some shit is going on that maybe I should know about, and more importantly, just in case all the "nutjobs" are right and there is more than meets the eye in this world; in other words there really is a spiritual realm and all of that, then is my heart in the right place? My thoughts? My soul? This shit ain't normal, yo. Show should be white. Heads-up.