As winter settles in , many of us are get an up - close look at more snowflake than we might care to . Let ’s take a moment to look at just what power are forge ( literally ) our winter atmospheric condition .
Top image : Alexey Kljatov
Earlier we took avery , very faithful lookat a series of snowflake airless - up shots taken by photographer Alexey Kljatov ’s . Commenterraijufilled us in on why some uniform geometric patterns were emerging :
https://gizmodo.com/amazing-close-up-photos-of-snowflakes-taken-without-a-m-1478945547
fundamentally , water molecules have a positivist and negative poles , which causes them to of course line up in a hexagon shape when they effloresce ( it ’s also the cause of a lot of water ’s nerveless property , like aerofoil tension ) . The center of a flake is almost always a hexagon ( although not always a arrant hexagon , as you could see from the dot - logotype like shape one ) . Once it reaches a certain size , the subdivision can jump to appear because it becomes too big to keep its form . These coat of arms always survey a rough 6 - way symmetry , since they are attached at the equidistant pole “ sticking out ” from the central hexagon .
https://gizmodo.com/1479518913
Of course , that still leaves the remainder between case-by-case snowbird to explain . And for that , we bend to commenterHypnosifl :
The basic account is that the formation of the branches is affected by pernicious variation in things like temperature and humidity in the atmosphere as the snowflake makes its trip down , and each leg on a single snowflake experiences the same chronicle of variant as it falls , but dissimilar flakes do n’t .
skill
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