According to Associated Press on Friday. Feb. 12, 2010 . . . “ Forget red and blue — color America white. There was snow on the ground in 49 states Friday. Hawaii was the holdout. It was the United States of Snow, thanks to an unusual combination of weather patterns that dusted the U.S., including the skyscrapers of Dallas, the peach trees of Atlanta and the Florida Panhandle, where hurricanes are more common than snowflakes.”
Yikes, maybe we can see the “magical” side of snow in the following story about snow crystals. So sit back enjoy a tantalizing cup of King’s Cupboard Hot Chocolate with a slice of King’s Cupboard White Chocolate Hazelnut Cake fresh from the oven, and pretend you are inside a beautiful snow globe looking out . . .
The story of a snow crystal begins in a cloud, when a minuscule cloud droplet first freezes into a tiny particle of ice. As water vapor starts condensing on its surface, the ice particle quickly develops facets, thus becoming a small hexagonal prism. For a while it keeps this simple faceted shape as it grows. As the crystal becomes larger, branches begin to sprout from the six corners of the hexagon (there are no eight-sided or four-sided snowflakes in nature). Since the atmospheric conditions (e. g. temperature and humidity) are nearly constant across the small crystal, the six budding arms all grow out at roughly the same rate.
While it grows, the crystal is blown around, bumping inside the cloud. The end result is a complex, branched structure that is also six-fold symmetric. Since snow crystals all follow slightly different paths through the clouds, individual crystals all tend to look different. In Antarctica the temperatures are cold and the air is dry, so snow crystals grow very slowly. This slow growth tends to produce very clean hexagonal prisms, which are well suited for producing beautiful atmospheric displays.
Snow is made of ice crystals, and up close the individual crystals look clear, like glass. A large pile of snow crystals looks white for the same reason a pile of crushed glass looks white. Incident light is partially reflected by an ice surface, again just as it is from a glass surface
The snowflake or ice crystal is a very simple example of self-assembly. There is no blueprint or genetic code that guides the growth of a snowflake, yet marvelously complex structures appear, quite literally out of thin air. Make your own snow crystal: http://www.zefrank.com/snowflake/
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This entry was posted by Monica Anderson
on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 3:19 pm and is filed under General.
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About The Author
The King's Cupboard has been making wonderful desserts since 1990. We are located in Red Lodge, Montana at the foot of the Beartooth Mountains.
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