WASHINGTON — A video capturing a giant panda playing in the snow amid a massive blizzard hitting the East Coast quickly went viral on Saturday morning.
The footage showed Tian Tian rolling around and sliding in tall mounds of the soft, powdery snow that covered zoo grounds.
A caption accompanying the video simply stated, “Tian Tian woke up this morning to a lot of snow…and he was pretty excited about it. #Blizzard2016.”
The video was posted on the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute’s Facebook page on Saturday about 7:10 a.m. An hour later, it had already been viewed more than 1.2 million times and shared by more than 115,000 users.
A massive storm was hitting a large swath of the eastern U.S. on Saturday, leaving cities from Washington to New York covered in snow and spurring blizzard warnings in many parts of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.
Up to 85 million people were in the path of the major winter storm.
