Wednesday, January 02, 2008

With the New Year upon us, try to take a moment or two today to coax a few secrets from snowflakes that fell on Monday. A cheap magnifying glass gets you part of the way. A microscope gets you even closer to pulling back the curtain on delicate, complex formations that are as fleeting as they are stunning. Getting a sense of their beauty sometimes requires a closer look and an understanding of what you're seeing. The easiest to spot with the naked eye is the "stellar dendrite," whose six symmetrical arms can feature elaborate branches and designs worthy of holiday stationery. But not every snowflake is a perfectly formed, asterisk-shaped wonder. Some are needlelike, and others are columns or plates. Still others are globular, sandlike blobs or flecked with bits of pollution. All of them have endured a harrowing journey through the atmosphere that makes them unique. Each flake is a collection of crystals, which start out as a tiny droplet of water in a cloud high in the Earth's atmosphere. When it freezes, the particle of ice grows into a six-sided plate because of the way hydrogen and oxygen molecules bond. As it grows, branches spring from the corners. The more water vapor condenses on the crystal, the more those arms grow. Its earliest moments, though, are pretty rough. Snowflakes are bashed and battered as they tumble toward the ground, changing shapes rapidly as they pass through different temperatures and humidity. So what are that chances that any two are exactly alike? Pretty darned small. Even though some may look similar, snowflakes hide a staggering array of possible arrangements - a tiny jagged branch here, a bulbed tip there and on and on. It's unlikely that any two complex snowflakes in the planet's history have ever been exactly the same. That's part of the magic of pausing to watch them fall and taking a closer look. With over 6 billion people on the planet, surely a few of us can be spared to ponder the subtle mysteries of snowflakes.