Snowflake 940
It’s December 1st, time for snowflakes! This one is special for me as it illustrates the magical – albeit disfiguring – process of sublimation. But before we get into all that, I want to remind everyone that my latest snowflake coin from the Royal Canadian Mint is now available – and they are selling out. I’m not sure how fast, but I do know that they have limited sales to one per person on their website: www.mint.ca/en/shop/coins/2023/dollar20-pure-silver-hexag... . Don’t miss out on the first hexagonal coin minted as collector’s Canadian currency.
This image depicts a primary set of five snowflakes, all photographed after they had been resting on the ground for a while. The telltale signs are obvious, starting with the very rounded tips of the outermost branches. By the logic that “what sticks out the farthest, grows the fastest”, the inverse is also true: what sticks out the farthest will sublimate the fastest in a low-humidity environment. Sublimation, for those unfamiliar with the word, is going from a solid state of matter directly to a gas without first becoming a liquid. Snowflakes will return to the air that created them fairly quickly, even in cold weather.
But there’s another area of sublimation that rarely gets discussed: internal or conjoined sublimation. Imagine a disc of air trapped inside a snowflake. As the water molecules sublimate in an enclosed space, they look for another place to attach themselves to. This is less likely to be large flat surfaces and more likely to be corners and edges. As this process continues, the flat surfaces will lose more molecules, and the edges will gain them. A disc, given enough time by this logic, would eventually become a sphere. It gets better (and more beautiful) when you have air trapped between two complex surfaces of different snowflakes effectively “holding hands”.
Vibrant tie-dye colour can be created by means of optical interference in these spaces. The gap between the two branches has to be narrow and the internal cavity mostly or completely closed off from the outside air. As water molecules release themselves in a low-humidity environment, they will re-attach on the surface structures available, in a much more complex manner than a disc becomes a sphere. Still, it’s effective a “rounding out” of the details. If the gap is thin enough, then physics plays a beautiful note to generate colours, the same physics that puts rainbows in soap film.
The fascination comes in the tiniest details around these rainbow puddles of air as well. Look close, and I mean REAL close, and you’ll see a curious trail of tiny bubbles around the larger sources of colour. I’m not a physicist, but I can hypothesize what is happening here: as the outer edges of the structure gather more of the errant water molecules, deviations in the surface topography can close off the structure while leaving little pockets of air behind, these discs then continuing their own fate to become independent spheres.
Sublimation is usually something I avoid; I want to photograph snowflakes as quickly as possible to preserve their original shapes and structures. However, if one allows a snowflake to “age” in a cluster, you might be surprised what treasures you can discover.
I’ll be trying my best to post a new snowflake photograph every other day until Christmas. Stay tuned for more. :)
Snowflake 940
It’s December 1st, time for snowflakes! This one is special for me as it illustrates the magical – albeit disfiguring – process of sublimation. But before we get into all that, I want to remind everyone that my latest snowflake coin from the Royal Canadian Mint is now available – and they are selling out. I’m not sure how fast, but I do know that they have limited sales to one per person on their website: www.mint.ca/en/shop/coins/2023/dollar20-pure-silver-hexag... . Don’t miss out on the first hexagonal coin minted as collector’s Canadian currency.
This image depicts a primary set of five snowflakes, all photographed after they had been resting on the ground for a while. The telltale signs are obvious, starting with the very rounded tips of the outermost branches. By the logic that “what sticks out the farthest, grows the fastest”, the inverse is also true: what sticks out the farthest will sublimate the fastest in a low-humidity environment. Sublimation, for those unfamiliar with the word, is going from a solid state of matter directly to a gas without first becoming a liquid. Snowflakes will return to the air that created them fairly quickly, even in cold weather.
But there’s another area of sublimation that rarely gets discussed: internal or conjoined sublimation. Imagine a disc of air trapped inside a snowflake. As the water molecules sublimate in an enclosed space, they look for another place to attach themselves to. This is less likely to be large flat surfaces and more likely to be corners and edges. As this process continues, the flat surfaces will lose more molecules, and the edges will gain them. A disc, given enough time by this logic, would eventually become a sphere. It gets better (and more beautiful) when you have air trapped between two complex surfaces of different snowflakes effectively “holding hands”.
Vibrant tie-dye colour can be created by means of optical interference in these spaces. The gap between the two branches has to be narrow and the internal cavity mostly or completely closed off from the outside air. As water molecules release themselves in a low-humidity environment, they will re-attach on the surface structures available, in a much more complex manner than a disc becomes a sphere. Still, it’s effective a “rounding out” of the details. If the gap is thin enough, then physics plays a beautiful note to generate colours, the same physics that puts rainbows in soap film.
The fascination comes in the tiniest details around these rainbow puddles of air as well. Look close, and I mean REAL close, and you’ll see a curious trail of tiny bubbles around the larger sources of colour. I’m not a physicist, but I can hypothesize what is happening here: as the outer edges of the structure gather more of the errant water molecules, deviations in the surface topography can close off the structure while leaving little pockets of air behind, these discs then continuing their own fate to become independent spheres.
Sublimation is usually something I avoid; I want to photograph snowflakes as quickly as possible to preserve their original shapes and structures. However, if one allows a snowflake to “age” in a cluster, you might be surprised what treasures you can discover.
I’ll be trying my best to post a new snowflake photograph every other day until Christmas. Stay tuned for more. :)