Short Stuff: Unique Snowflakes

You just smile and twirl to show them all you got and say, who doesn't love snowflakes? Love being a snowflake? So here's the deal. But the whole point of this uh fourteen minutes that you're gonna undertake with us is the old um not wives tale, because it's true, the old notion that snowflakes are actually unique, every single snowflake is actually unique. And the answer to that, we're happy to say is yes, it certainly seems to be the case. Yeah,

it's awesome. I feel like we've done something on this, like maybe in one of our short videos before something like that, But I wonder if we said the opposite. But now that we did this research, I'm like, how could we possibly have said the opposite. It's just not it's not possible. Yeah, I mean we we should say that a lot of snowflakes, and we're gonna go through how they're they're formed. But in the very early stages snowflakes can be pretty identical and and even in the

end sometimes they can be similar. But technically they are all unique because so many different things can affect each individual snowflake along the way that there's just no way that they could be the same. Yeah. It takes a mind boggling number of factors and inputs, each of which variables I guess you'd call them, each of which can change and just changed to one of them, got a different snowflake, changed to a couple, it got an even

more different snowflake. There's just so many, so many different things that go into making a snowflake that, yeah, it's it's just not possible that they're not all unique. But to understand all this, you have to understand how a snowflake is made. And by golly, Chuck and I are just the people to tell you all right, So we did some. I think it was our our happy Clouds episode which was really terrific quite a few years ago, which you can refer to if you want a longer explanation.

But um, when when rain or in this case snow falls out of the sky, it starts down on the surface of the earth, um as water that evaporates from our lakes, our oceans are rivers, rises up into the atmosphere as water vapor, and sometimes that can form a happy puffy cloud. It can and then depending on the type of cloud, and if it's cold enough, which it usually is, some of that water vapor will condense around, say like a piece of dust or something like that.

It will condense in from water vapor which is a gas, into liquid which is a liquid water, and usually it does it around like a piece of dust or something that that nucleates it. But what what another way to say it is it reaches its dew point, the point where the temperature where it changes from vapor into liquid. And as it does that, if it's cold enough, it

will then turn into ice. And what you have is basically the the beginning standard template of a snowflake, which if you stopped and said, okay, right, now, are all snowflakes alike? You would say, yeah, they're actually they're they're pretty similar. Sure, we'll go with that. But that's just like the beginning of the snowflake. It's the basis of it. It's the, like I said, the template that all snowflakes start from. And it's usually just a little six sided

hexagonal plate. Yeah. So you have these little tiny ice crystals. Uh, they start floating around in the sky and smashing and colliding with other water vapor molecules along the way, and every time it does that, it collects. Uh well, yeah, I guess it collects. It sort of con tacks these crystals and it sort of just starts collecting this stuff and getting a little more solid and a little more substantial all around that little original nucleus that was where

they were all similar to one another. Right. And then so this snowflake, as it's kind of moving around up in the atmosphere like I'm building, I'm growing, it runs into other water vapor, and that water vapor rather than going through the trouble of moving from a gas to a liquid to a solid, which is you know, an ice crystal it just it. It goes through what's called deposition. It goes straight from water vapor into a solid and

attaches to that snowflake template. And as it does so, um, it will start to form some of the more intricate details of that snowflake. And that happens again and again and again and again, and you get layer after layer after layer of ice crystals forming on this plate, and all of a sudden, you have like arms that account and those arms stick to get detailed. Now the snowflake

is starting to take shape. So you've got water vapor that freezes and starts to attract other water vapor that freezes onto it, that starts to give snowflakes their size and their shape. But there's lots more variables involved. That's right, And we'll take a little break here. We're gonna come back and talk about the remaining formation of snowflakes read after this. M M all right. So you mentioned that it was hexagonal or did you say hexagonal? I think

I said hexagonal like a dumb dumb uh. And so you know, you've got these little arms sticking out, and sometimes on the edge of these arms are a little jagged. Uh. It's sort of like jagged like a serrated knife. And these uneven areas as you know, exactly what you think. Because they're uneven and stuff sticking out a little farther, it's gonna attract even more water molecules than it would if it was smooth and uniform like other parts of

that same snowflake. So that's how you build out. When you think of like or if you see a you know, a microscopic view of a snowflake, Uh, those are what those little arms and those little jagged crystal sticking off

that make it so beautiful. That's what's going on there, right, And like you said, because these arms are kind of like sticking out there, they're attracting more and more water vapor that's sticking to them, and it's building out and growing out into this um larger, more intricate, more detailed

crystalline structure. So once you have those arms, it seems to be almost like, uh, I don't want to say a tipping point, you know why, but um, that is what happens, and all of a sudden, the snowflakes starts to really take shape. Yeah, and here's where the environment comes into play, because depending on a lot of different factors like, uh, temperature obviously humidity, um like really really really cold temperature that will really vary what kind of

snowflakes like size and shape that you're gonna get. Yeah, And I was like why temperature. So temperature is a measure of the um the movement the energy of like uh like molecules or atoms or whatever, right, but I couldn't figure out why the lower the temperature, the more intricate the snowflake got. Yeah, what is that? Everything I saw was just basically like, that's just the way it is. Yeah, So that's what we're gonna have to go with you. Basically,

is this is the way it is. If you understand why that is the case, please tell us because we want to know. Right. But like those when you think of those, uh they describe it as fern like arms, like those awesome looking arms with all the little jagged things sticking off. That's when it's like prime snowflake time, when it's super super cold, right precisely, um so, uh, you've got extra moisture, like if it's a little more humid, that that's gonna affect the shape of the snowflake. It's

gonna make them fatter usually and then lower temperature. So if you've got somehow higher higher humidity, lower temperature, that's when you get your true money snowflakes that people like put on the cover of National Geographic Yeah, lower humidity is flatter, um higher is fatter, Right, That's that's the rhyme that I was raised with. Uh And and like you said, if it's super humid and super cold, that's that's the rock star. Yes, So okay, that's the physics

of making a snowflake. There's all those different variables. There's some other ones to Like, snowflakes that are forming will collide with one another, then some of their arms will break off, so they'll that will then attract even more crystals. So that's going to change the shape and of it. Um the different conditions that form that are all factors and variables in the forming of a snowflake. All of those things change from cubic centimeter cubic millimeter of air

um between one next to another. So snowflake that forms in this one part of is passing through this one part of the atmosphere is going to be subject to these variables. But the same variables will be totally different,

you know, a couple of cubic centimeters over. So you've got all these different variables that are are coming into it, and apparently when you add these variables up, it becomes a there becomes a mind boggling number of different possible combinations of snowflakes, shapes, and crystalline structure, so much so that it just seems basically impossible that the over the current age of the universe, certainly over the current age of Earth, that enough snowflakes have fallen that two of

them could ever have been Like, yeah, so they estimate um as many as a quintillion quintillion number of molecules or quintillion molecules in a single snowflake, and that the possible combinations of all these molecules and potential combinations are two times as many as atoms as there are atoms in the entire universe. So I look that up. Is that could that be possible? That's that's what this article says.

The number of atoms in the universe is either between ten to the seventy eight power and ten to the eighties second power total atoms in the universe, which is between ten quadrillion vigintillion and no, I swear to God and a hundred thousand quadrillion vigintilions atoms, so twice that twice that he literally decided like like a ten year old quintillion bill basically, so that that there's that many different possible combinations of snowflakes um and that's just the structure.

If you take into account the different the different water molecules that come together, what time span would it take for enough snowflakes to fall and enough of this this this snowflake formation to happen, that all of those same water molecules happened to come together again, and that snowflake happens to take the same form because it's exposed to the same variables. It's just it probably will never ever ever happen. Yeah, I mean, a tiny fleck of dust

can change the crystals. Uh. The angle where you know we're talking about how they collide with one another. It's it's like a car crash. If you get t boned, your cars are going look different than if you get

hit head on. It's the same. They're depending on the angle in which they collide that's going to change the shape of the snowflake, so it really seems true that there may have never been to snowflake e exactly like in the end, you may be the first human being to ever use a car crash to illustrate how snowflakes can be different. Oh goodness. Uh, so that's why everyone, you can go around and feel very confident explaining to all of your friends and co workers and loved ones

that it is true no two snowflakes are like. They're all unique and different. Uh. And if you want to get in touch with us about this, you can go onto our website stuff we Should Know dot com, check out our social links there, and you can send us an email to stuff podcast how Stuff Works dot com.