Wednesday, May 02, 2007

It's getting warmer and warmer every day, but somehow yesterday I was dreaming about winter and snow. Maybe because I'm from a country with a very cold winter, and therefore I love winter, making snowman, when my nose gets red from the frost, the beauty of sparkling on the sun snow, and much - much more. So, today I wanted to tell you about snowflakes, in case you have never seen one magnified under a microscope, or even in real life. Snowflakes are made up of from 2 to 200 separate snow crystals. Snow crystals are crystals that have formed around bits of dirt that have been carried up into the atmosphere by the wind. So snow crystals are really soil particles that have been dressed up in ice. Can you imagine that? Scientists consider that there are four different shapes of snow crystals. The simplest shape is a long needle shaped like a spike. The other shapes all have six sides. One of them is a long, hollow column that is shaped like a six-sided prism. There are also thin, flat six-sided plates. And lastly there are intricate, six-pointed stars. The shape that a snow crystal will take is dependent upon the temperature at which it was formed. The snowflake magnification under a microscope starts at 93 times normal size and takes you up to 36000 times normal size. So, in order for you to see the texture and the makeup of a snowflake, you'll need a good microscope with excellent magnification.