The Snowflake Myth

Dr. Ken Libbrecht is a renowned snowflake researcher who served as a consultant for the movie Frozen and had his snowflake photographs featured on US Post Office stamps.

Ken uses high-voltage equipment to create snowflakes in controlled laboratory conditions, with needle tips around 100 nanometers in diameter.

Ken calls himself a designer snowflake creator, manually controlling growth conditions by adjusting temperature and humidity to produce snowflakes with specific characteristics.

Laboratory-grown snowflakes have sharper and crisper facets compared to natural snowflakes, which begin to evaporate as they fall through the atmosphere.

Wilson A. Bentley took the first close-up photograph of a snowflake in the wild in 1885 and originated the idea that no two snowflakes are alike.

Over his lifetime, Bentley photographed more than 5,000 snowflakes, with selections published in his book Snow Crystals, which remains in print today.

Bentley only selected snowflakes in pristine condition with uncommon beauty and symmetry, meaning most natural snowflakes look quite different from his famous photographs.

Finding beautiful snowflakes is extremely difficult; they are one in a million among the thousands that fall on any surface.

• Why do all snowflakes have six-fold radial symmetry? • How do opposite arms mirror each other so perfectly? • Why are snowflakes flat, measuring millimeters in diameter but only micrometers thick? • How does one side of the snowflake know what the other side is doing?

Snowflakes take many different forms beyond the classic plate shape, including hollow columns, needles, cups, bullets, and capped columns.

Ken Libbrecht identified 35 different types of snowflakes; historical classifications range from 41 to 108 types, with no universal standard definition.

All these different forms appear spontaneously from water vapor freezing into ice, with no DNA or blueprint controlling the process.

• Water evaporates into water vapor in the atmosphere • Rising vapor cools and becomes super saturated, with more water molecules than equilibrium • Molecules condense onto dust particles to form tiny droplets • One droplet eventually freezes, forming a hexagonal crystal seed

Water molecules form hydrogen bonds between the slightly negative oxygen and slightly positive hydrogen atoms, creating a hexagonal molecular lattice that determines crystal shape.

Water vapor molecules preferentially stick to rough surfaces with dangling molecular bonds and bounce off smooth, flat facet surfaces, causing rough areas to fill in and creating faceted shapes.

Around 100,000 droplets are required to make a single snowflake, and the process usually takes 30 to 45 minutes.

In the 1930s, Ukichiro Nakaya systematically studied snowflakes at the University of Hokkaido in Japan and discovered that temperature and super saturation level determine snowflake type.

• Around -2°C: plates form • At -5°C: columns and needles form • At -15°C: plates again • Below -20°C: columns and plates

Each snowflake reveals its growth history through its shape; you can determine the temperature and humidity conditions the crystal experienced by examining its structure.

Typical weather patterns like cold fronts produce capped columns because as air rises and cools, it first forms columns then plates, resulting in plates with columns on the ends.

The perfect symmetry between opposite arms of a snowflake is not because one side knows what the other is doing, but because both sides grow in identical conditions.

When a crystal changes position and temperature shifts, all six branches experience the same temperature change simultaneously and respond identically.

Each different snowflake follows a unique path through the atmosphere, experiencing a different set of temperature and humidity conditions, which is why no two snowflakes are alike.

In controlled laboratory conditions, Ken has created nearly identical twin snowflakes by growing them side by side under the same conditions, proving the theory.

The Nakaya Diagram explains most snowflake behavior, but it does not explain why we get columns at -5°C and then plates again at -15°C, a mystery unsolved since the 1930s.

Nucleation barriers are lower for large flat facets, but narrow facets have different barriers with dips at specific temperatures: narrow basal facets dip around -4°C and narrow prism facets dip at -15°C.

On narrow facet edges, water molecules stick to rough surfaces and diffuse to minimize surface energy, exceeding the critical density needed to overcome the nucleation barrier.

Ken's laboratory experiments investigating these effects agree nicely with the hypothesis, suggesting the molecular physics of ice may finally explain the diverse forms of snowflakes.

Ken has spent much of his career in astronomy and astrophysics, fields where researchers are never asked to justify their work by practical applications.

Ken's real reason for studying snowflakes is simple: looking at a snowflake reveals that we don't understand how it works, and as a scientist, he wanted to be the one to figure it out.

Scientific curiosity driven by genuine puzzlement about natural phenomena is reason enough to pursue research.

After 85 years, Ken's research may finally explain why snowflakes grow into such a diverse collection of columnar and plate-like forms through molecular physics.