Snowflakes one of nature’s miracles

Records have been broken right and left with the snowfalls of the past two weeks.

Cold-temperature records have also been broken, including an 18-below zero low temperature recorded at the Spokane airport last Saturday and a record low daytime high of 7 degrees in Coeur d’Alene that same day.

The snow keeps coming, and people are tired of shoveling. Instead of focusing on the “big picture” of the mound of white that keeps growing, how about focusing on the little picture – the individual snowflake?

I had a chance to really appreciate the beauty of the snowflake last week while I was driving my car. The car was still cold from being parked in the driveway of my mother’s house, and it happened to be snowing. Instead of just seeing the usual blur of white, I was able to see the individual snowflakes as they landed on my windshield without immediately melting. I stared at them as I was stopped at a stoplight, and there was this spectacular display of little stars made of ice crystals.

These were the types of snowflakes that you learned to cut out of white paper in elementary school, and they are called dendrites. Snowflakes not only come in many different sizes, however, but different shapes as well. The type of snowflake that falls depends on the temperature and moisture content of the cloud that they came from. Though I would say the star-shaped flakes are the most captivating, snowflakes can also form as simpler hexagonal plates, columns, or needles.

Snowflakes form, not when water freezes, but when water vapor condenses (water in its gaseous form becomes a liquid) directly on a small piece of ice or dust particle suspended in the clouds. When raindrops freeze before they hit the ground, it is called sleet.

Is it true that no two snowflakes are alike? Yes. But how do scientists know that? The conclusion is based on mathematical probability, when you examine snowflakes down to the molecular level. With the naked eye, you may be able to find two snowflakes that look similar. But because each individual snowflake is made up of many, many individual ice crystals, which are made with a variable number of individual water molecules, the number of possible combinations is staggering. There may even be variations within the water molecules themselves.

One of the first people to really focus (literally) on the snowflake was a farmer named Wilson Bentley. In 1885, he became the first person to photograph a single snow crystal. By combining the technology of a microscope and camera, he was able to capture more than 5,000 images of individual snowflakes during his lifetime. He never once found two that were exactly alike. He became known as “snowflake Bentley.” and had a book published in 1931 containing more than 2,400 of his snow crystal images. I leave you with this quote from him:

“Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed ashamed that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.”