S’no accident
By Ruth Schenk | .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
“He says to the snow, ‘Fall on the earth,’ and to the rain shower, ‘Be a mighty downpour.’ So that everyone He has made may know his work” (Job 37:6-7a).
“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail?” (Job 38:22).
It takes about 600,000 snowflakes to pack a good snowball.
As snowflakes fall on windshields, sidewalks and trees, they are beautiful to watch, fun to play with and far more complex than anyone imagined.
Each one is like a fingerprint—an individually unique creation of crystals. The mystery of how snow forms still fascinates scientists.
Even the simplest snowflakes fascinate Kenneth G. Libbrecht, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. As he studies
crystal growth and pattern formation with the goal to create better artificial snow, he calls snowflakes “miniature miracles of nature.”
Though it once seemed a bit flaky to insist that no two snowflakes are alike, it turns out it is probably true.
Snow crystals form when water vapor freezes around specks of dust high in the earth’s atmosphere.
As an ice crystal drops through the clouds, it bumps and knocks against other crystals, melting a little and refreezing along the way, falling to earth in a journey
different from that of any other snowflake.
A single snowflake is a pile of more than 200 ice crystals.
Cold, wind, moisture, temperature, humidity, height and tumbling through the atmosphere creates unique combinations of the crystal shapes that make
snowflakes: dendrites, plates, needles, sectored plates, thin and solid plates, hollow columns, capped columns and more.
Scientists have discovered that snowflake design is closely linked to temperature. When it is extremely cold, snow is fine and powdery, and snowflakes are
simple in design, usually shaped like needles or rods. When the temperature is close to freezing, snowflakes are larger and more complex in design. At 22
degrees, flakes form hollow columns. At 23 degrees, they form needles. In bitter cold temperatures of minus-30, snow stops forming altogether.
Despite 75 years of research, no one knows why.
“There really isn’t any comprehensive theory of what’s going on,” said Charles Knight of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “This is
very striking and very odd behavior, and I don’t know any convincing explanation of it.”
A hexagonal prism is the most basic snow crystal geometry. Prisms can be thin as plates, slender columns or anything in between. Dendrite means tree-like.
Stellar dendrites have branches and side branches. They are typically large crystals. The best powder snow is made of stellar dendrites.
Wilson A. Bentley, an early snowflake study pioneer, earned the nickname “Snowflake” Bentley from his 50-year study of snowflakes. Raised by Christian
parents on a farm in Vermont, he took Job 38 literally and set out to learn about “the treasures of snow.”
“God uses his creation to declare his glory to us,” Bentley wrote in one of his first published articles on snow.
At 15, he perfected sketching snowflake designs as he looked through a microscope and became the first person to photograph a single snow crystal in 1885.
He would go on to capture more than 5,000 snowflakes in his lifetime.
“Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others.
Each 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,” Bentley wrote.
The next time you see a snowflake, stop a minute to admire the design.