Introductory Guide to Snow Crystals and Snowflakes
- Snowflakes form when water vapor in the air cools and condenses into drops of water.
- Each drop then freezes into a tiny ice crystal smaller than the period ( . ) at the end of this sentence.
- The temperature and amount of water vapor determines the shape of snow crystals.
Cool Scientific Things to Know
- Symmetry, angles, and hexagon shapes of snowflakes and how water forms into ice crystals.
- Children can easily learn mathematical concepts while making paper snowflakes.
- Snowflakes are not square, 4 or 8 sided.
- Snowflakes are generally 6 sided (hexagonal) but can also be two, three and 12 sided.
- Snowflakes are composed of thousands of tiny, identical, hexagonal shaped ice crystals.
- Historical snow and ice exploration
- See how plant and leaf development resembles snowflake formation
Back to Contents
How Paper Snowflakes for Children Can Help
Back to Contents
What are common snowflake shapes and sizes?
Snowflake crystals form when water vapor cools and freezes inside clouds.
You might be surprised to find that snowflakes are not all six-sided.
Some snow crystals form into:
Back to Contents
Guide to Different Types of Snowflakes and Other Flaky Snow Facts
There are many reasons that no two snowflakes are alike. Factors that influence the size and shape of a snowflake are:
- Air currents (which direction the air is moving)
- Humidity levels (the amount of water vapor in the air)
- How long it takes the crystal to fall
- Wind speed
- Amount of dust, salt or other solid particles in the air
- Pressure from the weight of other snow crystals
- Combining shapes with other snow crystals
- Changes to any of these factors
Back to Contents
How do Snowflakes Form?
- Falling snow starts with precipitation
- Falling snow is called "Precipitated Snow".
- "Precipitate" means: to condense as a vapor and fall from the sky.
- Every snow crystal starts as "precipitation".
The book: "Rain, Hail, Snow and Sleet" teaches about "precipitation".
Back to Contents
Snowflakes are Symmetrical
- Every snowflake is a collection of snow crystals.
- Snowflakes can consist of only 2 snow crystals or hundreds of snow crystals.
- Snow crystals are frozen water molecules which bond to each other.
- Snowflakes are formed when Snow Crystals grow into tiny, sometimes microscopic, "symmetrical" shapes.
- "Symmetrical" means: proportional, or having an equal number of parts.
- A perfectly formed 6-sided snowflake is called "symmetrical".
Back to Contents
Metamorphosed Snow
- Every snowflake changes as it ages.
- Changing snow is called "Metamorphosed Snow".
- "Metamorphose" means: to change or transform into a different physical form.
- Water vapor that has changed into snow crystals is "Metamorphosed snow".
Back to Contents
It's true, just like human fingerprints are each different, every snowflake is different, although each snowflake is made up of thousands of tiny, identically shaped hexagonal crystals gathered together.
There are an infinite variety of snowflakes. Wilson (Snowflake) Bentley, an American farmer who devoted most of his life to the examination and photography of snowflakes, never found two identical snowflakes.
Snow crystal forms generally fall into broad categories, or Snowflake and Ice Crystal Classifications which are used to create a common form of reference to describe snow crystals.
Back to Contents
Why should we care about Snow types?
The simple answer: Avalanches Happen
Global Snowflake Network Scientists are enlisting volunteers to document the shape of snowflakes around the world.
Back to Contents
Where is the Coldest Place on Earth?
Antarctica is the coldest place on earth. The next coldest places are a few areas in Russia.
The snowflakes that fall on Antarctica hold valuable scientific information about the atmospheric conditions at the time of their formation.
This long-term climatic and environmental information is contained in the dust, chemicals and gas that was trapped in the ice during the snowflake's formation.
The Antarctic ice sheet is a collection of snowfalls that fell over hundreds of thousands of years.
Sources:
Back to Contents
