Author of "An Account of the Arctic Regions and Voyage to the Whale Fishery"
William Scoresby was a captain of a whaling ship and an amateur scientist who surveyed the Artic coasts of Greenland and Jan Mayan island. He enjoyed studying how ice and snowflakes formed under various weather conditions. He devoted 17 years of his life to the documentation of ice conditions in the Arctic.
On one voyage through the Arctic in 1820, he created detailed sketches of snow crystals. The large versions of William Scoresby's drawings in Paper Snowflakes web site are based upon those 1820 sketches, however, they are not all "100% exact" copies, however, because some of the Scoresby sketches weren't quite symmetrical and Snowflake couldn't resist fixing them.
You can see the original, scanned William Scoresby images among the Snowflake photographs in The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Teachers can use these images to teach children about William Scoresby, the history of snowflake exploration and to introduce snowflake science.
Select the thumbnail image to view the larger pattern.
Visit Kenneth Libbrecht's Historic Snowflakes page for more information.
