Winter has come and at full speed for parts of the US already. This is an amazing time-lapse of how that fluffy white snow is formed. It’s serenely mesmerizing, not unlike the feeling watching it quietly falling from the night sky.
Artist Vyacheslav Ivanov beautifully captures how different temperatures yield a variety of crystalline structures. These structures can range anywhere from crystalline needles to the symmetrical snowflakes you catch on your tongue. A snow crystal, as the name implies, is a single crystal of ice. A snowflake is a more general term; it can mean an individual snow crystal, a few snow crystals stuck together or large agglomerations of snow crystals that form "puff-balls" that float down from the clouds.
The life of a snowflake starts out as water vapor that condenses into droplets that are super cooled. They begin to freeze and crystallize, as surrounding water vapor lands on the structure; it freezes and becomes part of the growing process. This additional freezing water occurs more quickly on the edges, forming cavities that will become the gaps and grooves seen in the final snowflake plate. Six arms begin to grow out of the corners. The size and shape of those arms is also impacted by the changing weather conditions as the snowflake gets whipped through the air. However, all of the arms will look pretty much the same because they were all subjected to the same environmental conditions.
[via i09]
amazing i wonder how i was done