Skip to main content

Snowflakes


In the realm of science, there are many things which are not fully understood. The mechanism behind the formation of a snowflake crystal is one of these things.


It would seem that something so common would have been completely figured out by this time; after all, scientists have even studied atoms, the building blocks of all matter in the universe. But no, snowflakes remain a mysterious subject.

So what have we figured out about snowflakes so far? They form when water vapor condenses around an ice particle, and they form six sides due to the shape of an individual water molecule. But there's still a lot we don't know.

This snowflake has definite, albeit slightly imperfect, symmetry.
One problem with our current knowledge is that snowflakes tend to form six-sided shapes which are symmetrical. The odds of two snowflakes sharing the same pattern is unimaginably small, and yet the snowflake itself contains 6 copies of the same pattern. Why does each arm develop the same way? Scientists aren't entirely sure.

Most snowflakes either form with defects or become damaged from the fall.
Although this snowflake is thin and hard to see,
it has a beautiful, complex pattern.
Another problem is that snowflakes aren't always flat, but can also form needles, columns, and prisms. Scientists have noticed that temperature and atmospheric conditions can predict what types of snowflakes will form, but they haven't explained how the process works.

Finally, during the STS-7 and STS-8 space shuttle missions, artificially grown snowflakes were shaped like sphere-like polyhedrons, instead of the flat shapes of snowflakes produced on earth. Are the shapes of snowflakes influenced by gravity? Scientists aren't entirely sure about that either.

Interestingly, not all snowflake crystals form with 6 sides - some rare ones form with 3 or 12 sides. In one snowstorm, there were tons of large crystals which appeared to have 7 to 10 sides, but were probably malformed 12 sided crystals. Scientists aren't sure what conditions result in the formation of 3-sided or 12-sided snowflakes.


Whether scientists understand them or not, snowflakes are amazing things. In this post, I included some photos of snowflakes I've taken this winter using my macro photography technique.

Notice that they aren't all perfect - some are broken, some have only partly formed. The perfect snowflakes shown in magazines are not as easy to find as you might think.

What types of snowflakes have you seen?


New posts every month - subscribe for free!

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dividing Paper Puzzle

When I was young, I would fold a sheet of letter paper in half, for origami projects. It occurred to me that the two halves looked almost the same as the whole sheet of paper - except they were smaller. I could see they weren't exactly the same shape; they were off by a little bit. But the idea stuck in my head. You can use a pen, instead of scissors, to halve the paper. Those rectangles all have the same shape, but are different sizes. One night when I was 12, I thought about my idea. I wondered if it was possible to have a sheet of paper that could be cut in half, resulting in 2 smaller versions of the same paper. That would be neat, to be able to cut a paper in half and get 2 papers that had the same exact shape. If that were possible, then you could cut  those  papers, too; and the resulting papers would have the same shape as all the other papers. You could keep cutting in half forever, and each paper, no matter how small, would have the same shape as all the ot...
6 comments
Read more

Pluto No Longer on the Horizon

This morning, New Horizons became the first spacecraft to make a flyby observation of the Pluto system. During the mission, the spacecraft captured the most detailed photographs of Pluto's surface we've ever had, and possibly ever will have. It also found many new properties including size, mass, atmosphere, and surface composition. In a period of a few hours, we discovered more about Pluto than we've found in the 85 years since Clyde Tombaugh captured its first photograph. Before After  (images credit: NASA) To complete this mission, the spacecraft flew for more than 9 years through the emptiness of space. This may sound like a long time, but it's actually amazingly quick. In fact, New Horizons set the record for the fastest speed at launch, and during the flyby, the spacecraft was moving at a rate of over 30,000 mph, or roughly 50 times the speed of sound. Picture an object twice as heavy as a grand piano moving 25 times faster than a bullet from a gun. Yikes. The man...
2 comments
Read more

Gravity

Imagine the universe is filled with water. Instead of empty space, every inch of it contains pure water. No planets, no stars, only water. What happens? And what would happen if an air bubble formed? The answer to this question requires a basic understanding of gravity. Gravity is very important. It helps hold matter together, bends light, and distorts space-time (which, incidentally, is how it bends light). It also makes it possible to play football, and as Americans are big football fans, they would certainly agree that we couldn't live without it. Unfortunately, many Americans don't understand how gravity works. Admittedly, scientists haven't figured out a lot of things, but we do understand it well enough to make predictions and model physical events. One of the important things about gravity is that its strength is proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance. In other words, it gets weaker as you get farther away, based on the equation: F = c/d 2 where c ...
6 comments
Read more