Snowflake facts

The following are some facts about snowflakes. You will see the words snowflake and snow crystal mentioned in the facts below. In actuality a snow crystal has six sides and is small, and a snowflake is made from several six-sided crystals stuck together. Often though, a snow crystal is called a snowflake and a snowflake is called a snow crystal.

1.  We have all heard the saying, “there are no two snowflakes that are alike”.  Most of us, however, do not know that the saying is attributed to Wilson A. Bentley (1865-1931).  Bentley lived in a small town in Jericho, Vermont.  He was a self-educated farmer who had a great interest in photomicrography.  He attached a microscope to his bellows camera and began his most notable work of photographing snow crystals (snowflakes). After many trials and errors, in 1885 he became the first person to photograph a single snowflake.  In his lifetime, he took more than 5,000 snowflake photographs. Amazingly, no two snow crystals were alike! Because of his accomplishments, a published book, “Snowflakes” and his love for his work, he was called, “Snowflake Bentley”.

2. In 1988, fifty plus years after the publication of Wilson A. Bentley’s book on snowflakes, an American meteorologist was noted as supposedly proving Bentley wrong. Following the publication of Wilson A Bentley’s book, Snowflakes in 1931, a scientist claimed to have discovered two flakes that were alike. That discovery, though, has been challenged.

3. While some people have claimed to look at snowflakes under microscopes finding two alike, experts like Jon Nelson, a research scientist at Ritsumeikan University in Japan and Charles Knight a snow scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado claim, as do other experts, that the likelihood for there being two identical snowflakes is next to impossible. This impossibility is due to a few reasons.

4. The first reason stated by the experts that two snowfalkes/snowcrystals that look alike may never be found is as follows: It is estimated by scientists that there are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 water molecules found in a snow crystal, therefore, the way they arrange themselves into crystal forms is pretty near infinite. Secondly, if someone tried to compare a million snow crystals, and took two seconds to compare each of them, it would take them almost a hundred years.

5. The size of snowflakes is usually determined by the temperature in the troposphere, which is the lowest portion of the Earth’s atmosphere. When the temperature throughout the troposphere is well below freezing the snow is a dry snow and has little to no liquid in the snowflakes. These snowflakes are small.  When the temperature in the troposphere is near freezing 32 degrees or just above freezing, these snowflakes begin to melt making it easy for them to stick together forming what appears to be large snowflakes.  These large snowflakes are actually many snow crystals stuck together.

6. According to the Guinness World Book of Records, the largest recorded snowflake was a whopping 15 inches wide and 8 inches thick.  This largest snowflake was reported by Matt Coleman in 1887 in Fort Keogh, Montanna. He said the snowflake was larger than milk pans. More recent and accurate reports are of large snowflakes that were baseball-sized.

7. Scientists at this point in time believe there are five different shapes of snow crystals. There are long needle shapes, hollow columns (hexagonal shaped) that are shaped like a six-sided prism, six pointed star shapes, thin and flat six-sided shaped plates, and intricately shaped dendrites (branch shaped).

8.  Snowflakes are not formed, as many people think, when raindrops freeze.  Frozen raindrops are sleet. Snowflakes are formed inside of clouds when water droplets freeze and become ice particles. These ice particles, for different reasons, take on shapes of their own.

9. Snow crystal shapes are formed according to the temperatures in which they are formed. At 21 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit long needle shapes are formed, at 14 to 21 degrees Fahrenheit hollow columns are formed, at 10 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit six-pointed stars are formed, at 25 to 32 degrees Fahrenheit thin and flat six-sided plates are formed, and at 10 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit dendrites are formed. 

10. The fluffiest snow falls when the temperature is around 15 degrees Fahrenheit.

11. A snowflake falls about two feet per second (four mph). It can take about eight minutes to fall 1,000 feet.

12.  When snowflakes land on water they ‘scream’. They emit a high frequency sound caused by trapped air bubble that vibrate at a rate of 200,000 times per second (200kHz).