Nice shot of a colorful leaf outlined with snowflakes. I've always wondered how it would feel to live in a city where it snows. I can just imagine the coldness and coolness of playing with the snow, and waiting for each snowflake to drop on my cold face. But did you know that no two snowflakes are alike?
Snowflakes form in a wide variety of intricate shapes, leading to the popular expression that "no two are alike." Although statistically possible, it is very unlikely for any two snowflakes to be exactly alike due to the roughly 1019 water molecules which make up a typical snowflake, which grow at different rates and in different patterns depending on the changing temperature and humidity within the atmosphere that the snowflake falls through on its way to the ground united. Initial attempts to find identical snowflakes by photographing thousands of them with a microscope from 1885 onward by Wilson Alwyn Bentley found the wide variety of snowflakes we know about today.
It is more likely that two snowflakes could become virtually identical if their environments were similar enough. Matching snow crystals were discovered in Wisconsin in 1988. The crystals were not flakes in the usual sense but rather hollow hexagonal prisms.
Now we know!
Read more about snowflakes via Wikipedia.
[Click the image to view on flickr and see the author] :)
You need to be a member of Wave Avenue to add comments!
Join Wave Avenue