The Story of a Snowflake

Snowflakes are like people.

The folk wisdom that no two snowflakes are exactly alike is, as it turns out, not folk wisdom at all, but solid science. Though there have certainly been plenty of snowflakes that are almost alike, an exact match has, indeed, never as yet been found.

The same, of course, goes for us humans. But the similarities between snowflakes and people hardly stop there. To see why that is, all we need to do is take a look at the life of a snowflake, from its birth high in the winter skies to its eventual arrival down here on earth.

Snowflakes (the correct scientific term is really snow crystals) are born when a water molecule (that is, two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom) gets together with others of its kind to form a hexagonal (that is, six-sided) lattice.

This two-parts-hydrogen-and-one-part-oxygen structure of water dictates that as ever more water molecules condense out of the air and join the growing snow crystal, they will continue to do so in such a way that ever more hexagons of hydrogen and oxygen are formed.

Too complicated? Take a cherry and stick two toothpicks in it at a slight angle, so that the toothpicks stick out from either side bending slightly downward, like the arms of an exasperated person saying “what more do you want from me?”

The cherry, in this model, is an oxygen molecule, while the toothpicks are the two hydrogen molecules that, when stuck to the cherry, form a water molecule. Make five or six more water molecules and play around with them. You’ll discover that you naturally start forming the molecules together in such a way that you have a waffle-like structure made up of six-sided rings of cherries and toothpicks.

Though that’s hardly what the process would really look like if we could see it taking place in the skies, this basic model suggests why it is that water molecules, when they freeze, naturally form themselves into a series of linked hexagons of hydrogen and oxygen.

Simple as this process is from a scientific angle, there’s an aura of mystery around the birth of a snowflake that not even scientists are immune to feeling.

“Snow birth,” writes Guy Murchie in his book, Song of the Sky, is literally sublime. It generally occurs unseen in the great secret heights where the conditions of cold most favor the transition from vapor to solid without becoming liquid along the way.”