Snowflake-a-Day #32
As far as unique features go, this overtly triangular snowflake should win a prize. There’s lots to see here, including the fact that it has only five branches! View large!
Let’s start from the center and work our way outward. The very center of this snowflake has a small radiating plate, difficult to see but there is a crystal jutting up out of the center on a totally different parallel to the rest of the snowflake. This often happens when a snowflake encounters super-cooled water droplets that impact the surface of the crystal and disrupt the natural molecular pattern of the crystal. As a bulge of new ice, they act like a nucleation point for a new crystal structure to grow off of, and we can see a lot of these impacts spread across the snowflake. Only one has turned into a radiating crystal, conveniently right in the center.
Because this radiating crystal is right at the center, the impact that created may have happened when the snowflake was very small, and affected the branched growth. Potentially creating turbulence in the air surrounding the snowflake, it could have forced more water vapour to certain parts of the crystals, or weighted the snowflake differently to achieve the same effect. The initial growth is skewed, and the bottom left branch never properly formed. You can see a tiny vestigial branch that’s surrounded by side-branches from other main branches.
A side-branch from the bottom main branch prominently took over the growth in this area, and it’s interesting that it is the same size as the bottom right and top branches. The snowflake maintains symmetry because this area had available water vapour to grow the structure, even though it wasn’t accumulating on the lower left branch itself. I see this a lot where a snowflake will “heal” itself when a part breaks off, with other side-branches taking up the task of balancing out the snowflake.
The outward shape is of strong interest to me, because I have a hard time explaining it. Usually triangular crystals reform over time to slowly bring balance back to their overall shape, but this one has a stronger trigonal shape on the outside than it does on the inside. It all comes back to the point that whatever sticks out the farthest, grows the fastest, and we might find an answer there.
Take the lower right side, for example. Side-branches from neighbouring branches mirror the size and shape of the lower right branch itself. If these side-branches are collecting more water vapour than usual, they are also starving the main branch in the same region. This stunts the growth of the branch, as the building blocks are split equally among all the outward growth along this side of the snowflake. This answers the “how”, but why did this happen in the first place? To me, that’s still a mystery.
If you love mysteries like this, simply enjoy these images or want to capture snowflakes like this to make your own discoveries, the perfect book is Sky Crystals: www.skycrystals.ca/book/ - it covered all the physics and photographic techniques to understand these winter gems, and create images just like this. In the heart of winter, it’s a fantastic read for any naturalist or macro photographer!
Snowflake-a-Day #32
As far as unique features go, this overtly triangular snowflake should win a prize. There’s lots to see here, including the fact that it has only five branches! View large!
Let’s start from the center and work our way outward. The very center of this snowflake has a small radiating plate, difficult to see but there is a crystal jutting up out of the center on a totally different parallel to the rest of the snowflake. This often happens when a snowflake encounters super-cooled water droplets that impact the surface of the crystal and disrupt the natural molecular pattern of the crystal. As a bulge of new ice, they act like a nucleation point for a new crystal structure to grow off of, and we can see a lot of these impacts spread across the snowflake. Only one has turned into a radiating crystal, conveniently right in the center.
Because this radiating crystal is right at the center, the impact that created may have happened when the snowflake was very small, and affected the branched growth. Potentially creating turbulence in the air surrounding the snowflake, it could have forced more water vapour to certain parts of the crystals, or weighted the snowflake differently to achieve the same effect. The initial growth is skewed, and the bottom left branch never properly formed. You can see a tiny vestigial branch that’s surrounded by side-branches from other main branches.
A side-branch from the bottom main branch prominently took over the growth in this area, and it’s interesting that it is the same size as the bottom right and top branches. The snowflake maintains symmetry because this area had available water vapour to grow the structure, even though it wasn’t accumulating on the lower left branch itself. I see this a lot where a snowflake will “heal” itself when a part breaks off, with other side-branches taking up the task of balancing out the snowflake.
The outward shape is of strong interest to me, because I have a hard time explaining it. Usually triangular crystals reform over time to slowly bring balance back to their overall shape, but this one has a stronger trigonal shape on the outside than it does on the inside. It all comes back to the point that whatever sticks out the farthest, grows the fastest, and we might find an answer there.
Take the lower right side, for example. Side-branches from neighbouring branches mirror the size and shape of the lower right branch itself. If these side-branches are collecting more water vapour than usual, they are also starving the main branch in the same region. This stunts the growth of the branch, as the building blocks are split equally among all the outward growth along this side of the snowflake. This answers the “how”, but why did this happen in the first place? To me, that’s still a mystery.
If you love mysteries like this, simply enjoy these images or want to capture snowflakes like this to make your own discoveries, the perfect book is Sky Crystals: www.skycrystals.ca/book/ - it covered all the physics and photographic techniques to understand these winter gems, and create images just like this. In the heart of winter, it’s a fantastic read for any naturalist or macro photographer!