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Kenneth Libbrecht / Caltech
Kenneth Libbrecht, professor of physics at California Institute of Technology, photographs snowflakes in the field and in his lab. Studio-type lighting, even outdoors, brings out angles, texture and color that are otherwise hard to spot.
By Tia Ghose, LiveScience
Winter snowstorms, like the Nor'easter that just slammed New England, transform gray days into winter wonderlands.
So while you're stuck inside, or within snowshoe-walking distance, here are six fun facts about snow, from the idea that no two snowflakes are alike to the bizarre megadunes that blanket Antarctica.
Unique beauty
According to physicists, it's actually true that no two snowflakes are alike — well, at least when it comes to complex snowflakes.
Snowflakes form when water droplets in the clouds freeze to form a six-sided crystal structure. As the temperature cools, more water vapor freezes and grows in branches from the six sides of the seed crystal. As the crystals form, they are randomly tossed about inside the clouds, which vary in temperature.
The temperature greatly affects how the snowflake forms, so while the simplest hexagonal crystals may look alike, more complicated beauties each have their own unique shapes. [See Stunning Photos of Snowflakes]
White triangles
Most snowflakes form dazzling crystal patterns with six sides. But occasionally, a triangular crystal forms, something that has puzzled physicists for years. A 2009 study in the open-access, pre-publish journal arXiv.org revealed that triangular snowflakes form when the six sides of the seed crystals are slightly asymmetric. This makes them wobble randomly as a snowflake falls, allowing the bigger sides to hit the fast-flowing air inside the cloud, and grow at the expense of the smaller sides.
Other snowflakes have even stranger shapes: Some look like hourglasses, others like spools of thread and still others like needles. And while the quintessential snowflake is the six-armed, symmetrical beauty, most versions are hardly so picturesque. In fact, since the arms of a snowflake all grow randomly, asymmetrical snowflakes are more common.
Snowy shapes
The types of snowflakes that form depend a lot on the temperature and moisture in the clouds, according to a 2005 review in the journal Reports on Progress in Physics. Right around freezing temperatures, hexagonal plates (the cross-section is a two-dimensional hexagon) and the iconic, six-sided snowflake (known as a dendrite) form.
As the temperature cools, snowflakes develop into needles, then hexagonal prisms and even hollow columns. Go colder still, and dendrites form at much larger sizes. And at truly frigid temperatures, the frigid air forms prisms and flat plates.
ESO
This photo of penitentes, ice formations formed in high-altitude regions, was taken in December 2005 along the Chajnantor plain in Chile.
Piles and piles
Because snow is so fluffy (meaning it's chock full of air), a relatively small amount of water can translate into a huge pile of snow. An inch of rain on average makes about 10 inches of snow. The biggest snowfalls on record are hard to compare, but the Great Snow of 1717 dropped about 3 to 4 feet (0.9 to 1.2 meters) on Boston inhabitants, with some drifts reaching 25 feet (7.6-m), according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
In 1959, a snowstorm in Mt. Shasta dropped as much as 15.75 feet (4.8 meters) on inhabitants of the California region, according to the College of the Siskiyous. In the 1998 to 1999 snow season, about 95 feet (28.9 m) of snow fell on Mt. Baker, Wash.
Graupel and hoar Frost?
An old saying claims the Eskimos have dozens of different words for describing snow. While that turned out to be a myth, there are many types of snow crystals and even more snow formations. Aside from the snowflake, there's also hoar frost and graupel, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Hoar frost forms on surfaces that are colder than the frost point in the air around them, so water goes straight from vapor to solid. This spiky, fluffy snow tends to form on tree branches, telephone wires and other skinny items exposed to the chilly air. Graupel, which consists of hard ice pellets, forms when snowflakes fall through a cloud that contains supercooled water droplets. The droplets freeze onto the snowflakes and form misshapen, lumpy balls.
Snow landscape
While the snow on the driveway may just be a pile, the fluffy white stuff creates beautiful formations in nature. Lovers of winter sports know to be wary of cornices, overhanging snow that juts from the edge of a cliff.
And in Antarctica, giant snow formations known as megadunes form from monstrous snow crystals that are up to 0.75 inches (2 cm) across, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. (There can be several snow crystals in a single snowflake.) In arid locales like Death Valley, Calif., piles of snow can be transformed into penitents: bizarre, spiky formations that look like the stalagmites that form in caves.
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By chewing pollen the bee produces a glob of wax. Immediately after the placement, the saliva or water of the glob interacts in repelling the wax away from the glob's nucleus.
The wax takes on the shape produced from the three nuclei orbits of the water nucleus. What is called evaporation leaves an empty six pole or six sided wax structure.
THE SNOW FLAKE
An information cell (info cell) excreting from a life form of Earth (AURA) interacts
with the force, centrifugal, and is taken aloft. In its mutation or evolution it becomes a size to interact with the force, gravity, (forces of equal evolution act upon forces of equal evolution). This determines the uniformity and elevation as these gas 'info cells' interact with the temperature, COLD, producing water (cloud).
Each water droplet has is own info cell (nucleus) producing its own aura. In the case of cold temperature (freezing) the orbits of nuclei of the nucleus go into a chaotic state and instead of harmony or attraction, they are running into each other repelling. This causes the nucleus of the rain drop to literally unfold itself crystallizing as a unique SNOW FLAKE.
I think that's only for enriched weaponized snowflakes, not the average garden variety found in nature, or gardens.
The idea that no two snowflakes are identical was blown out of the water in 1988 by a scientist,Nancy Knight(at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder,Colorado), was in Wisconsin studying wispy high altitude cirrus clouds in a snowstorm.Her research plane was collecting snowflakes on a chilled glass slide, coated with sticky oil. When she examined them afterwards(under microscope, at least) afterward, found two identical ones.
Since the earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago, about a million million million million million snowflakes have fallen – but Mr.Bentley, the man who first studied snowflakes and made his pronouncement of the cold hard fact that no two looked the same, which everyone has since believed,did so after looking at just over 5,000 of them.
Serious efforts to classify them by scientists,have yielded up to 80 catagories of them, though each starts out the same. As the discovery in 1988 helped prove. It is passing through various temperatures,moisture,distance traveled,speed, even the particulates of pollution, which makes all the difference in how the water molecules develop in the magical snowflakes in the end.