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The Snowflake: Winter's Frozen Artistry
Take a deeper look at the unique, hidden beauty of winter with the world's foremost snowflake expert. From ten thousand feet above the Earth, a snowflake begins its fall. Its journey starts when ice forms around a nucleus of dust and is blown by the winds through clouds where the crystals blossom into tiny ice stars. Because it weighs next to nothing, a snow crystal may take hours to fall--finally landing where Caltech physicist Kenneth Libbrecht can use microphotography to record the tiny, intricate, frozen artistry of the snowflake. In The Winter's Frozen Artistry , Libbrecht teams with author Rachel Wing to create the most fascinating book on snowflakes ever published. This book defines the art and science of snowflakes for generations. Join Libbrecht and Wing as they charmingly chronicle the creation of snow crystals, both in nature and in the laboratory. The Winter's Frozen Artistry touches the hand of Mother Nature, showing incredible microphotography of individual snow crystals from all over the world. The book tells the history of snowflake observations mixed with an entertaining blend of tales of hunting snowflakes, snowflakes in literature and art, and the science of snowflakes, to bring a flurry of delightful snowflakes into the hands of warm-bodied humans everywhere. With this captivating book, we can better appreciate snowflakes, winter's frozen artistry.
144 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2015
18 people are currently reading
335 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 2, 2016
Interesting book with gorgeous photos -- brushes on a lot of what is known and not about snowflakes.
December 21, 2023
I already have a Dover book on ice crystals (or I've given it away....I think that's the case) but it was really the work of W A Bentley of Vermont. And the current book is the work of a couple of snow scientists. I was a bit sad to see how they felt that they had to justify their work in the last couple of paragraphs. I feel that it stands on its own as a contribution to knowledge. Certainly the husband and wife team have pulled together some really interesting material about snow crystals and the science behind their formation plus they have produced some really lovely art works from their photos.
I've extracted a few segments from the book that caught my attention, as follows:
We name snowflakes for the same reason we name anything—so we can more easily talk about them. Certain snow crystals are common and distinctive looking, and those have fairly well-defined names. Stellar plates, stellar dendrites, fernlike stellar dendrites, hollow columns, and capped columns have all been part of the snowflake vocabulary for some time. Go significantly beyond that, however, and opinions differ. In an effort to be inclusive, perhaps, tables of snowflake types have become larger with time. In the 1940s the largest classification chart included 41 members. This number jumped to 80 in the 1960s, and recently a new table appeared with 121 different snowflake types. The chart the Libbrechts have produced on p27 shows their preferred snowflake classification. Because there can be no such thing as a final, definitive catalog, thy've pared the number down to make a chart that is convenient for snowflake watching. (It's a temperature cvs humidity chart and I recall seeing something similar in Scientific American many years ago.
Typically, cloud droplets must be chilled to somewhere between 21 degrees Fahrenheit (–6 ° C) and 5 degrees Fahrenheit (–15 ° C) before they turn into ice. Remove the dust, and droplets of very pure water can be supercooled to nearly–40 degrees Fahrenheit (–40 ° C) before they freeze. After it leaves the clouds, the snowflake no longer has a ready source of water vapour, so it stops growing. From then on the crystal drifts slowly downward with a typical velocity of around one mile per hour.
About one hundred thousand cloud droplets provide enough water vapour to make a single snowflake. It depends on how well things are mixed in the atmosphere, but there are probably, very roughly, about a thousand of your molecules captured in every snowflake picture.
The art of snowmaking is now so advanced that you can cover your lawn with white anytime and anywhere, even in summer. Compressed air doesn’t have the cooling power to make summertime snow, but liquid nitrogen freezes those droplets with aplomb.
The hands-down favourite snow inducer comes from the bacterium Pseudomonas syringae. This little beasty produces proteins that nucleate freezing at 28 degrees Fahrenheit (–2 ° C), Scientists were studying the bacterium to better understand and mitigate frost damage on crops. But instead, some clever person realized that this microbe’s talents could be harnessed for making artificial snow. The end result is better skiing at a lower price. You never know where science will take you.
Does it ever snow on other worlds? Possibly, but the snowflakes might look quite different from those found on Earth. On Mars, for example, water ice and carbon-dioxide ice (commonly known as dry ice) have both been spotted, and the latter can be several meters thick at the poles. It is still not known, however, if dry ice falls from the Martian atmosphere as “snowflakes” or forms directly on the surface like frost.
In 1611, Kepler presented a small treatise entitled The Six-Cornered Snowflake to his patron, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, as a New Year’s Day gift. He reasoned that each single plant has a single animating principle of its own, since each instance of a plant exists separately, and there is no cause to wonder that each should be equipped with its own peculiar shape. But to imagine an individual soul for each and any starlet of snow is utterly absurd, and therefore the shapes of snowflakes are by no means to be deduced from the operation of soul in the same way as with plants. Because it was known that cannonballs display a hexagonal pattern when stacked in a pile, Kepler conjectured that these two symmetries might be related. There was a germ of truth in this reasoning, because the geometry of stacking atoms lies at the heart of snow crystal symmetry. But the atomistic view of matter had not been developed by Kepler’s time. the word crystal really comes from quartz and Pliny described clear quartz as frozen ice. Pliny’s misunderstanding is still felt in the language of the present day. If you look in your dictionary, you may find that one of the first definitions for crystal is simply “quartz.” This is like saying the definition of food is “potato.” Funny how some quirks in the language remain after thousands of years.
In the crystal world, there are thirty-two possible ways to stack molecules, including five different cubic forms and seven different hexagonal ones. Some symmetries are forbidden—there are no crystal structures with five-fold symmetry, for example. This is true for the same reason you cannot tile your floor with pentagonal tiles; pentagons simply do not fit together without leaving gaps. In the European Union, “lead crystal” must be composed of at least 24 percent lead oxide, while “crystal glass” must include similar amounts of other metal oxides.
Smooth surfaces are difficult to hold onto, while the rough spots have lots of dangling molecular bonds to grab. As a result, the rough spots accumulate molecules quickly, while the smooth surfaces do so more slowly. Before long, the rough areas add water molecules and fill in, leaving only the smooth areas to define the shape of the crystal. These smooth, slower-moving surfaces become the crystal facets. Faceting is an important player in the genesis of snow crystal structure. Faceting explains the formation of simple hexagonal prisms, defining the snow crystal’s six-fold symmetry. But most snowflakes are much more elaborate than simple prisms, so faceting is only part of the story. The six corners of a snow crystal grow a bit faster because they stick out farther into the humid air, causing branches to sprout. As the crystal grows larger, the same effect causes sidebranches to sprout from the faceted corners of each branch. This process is responsible for the complex shapes of snow crystals. The corners experience runaway growth as this cycle accelerates—the corners stick out a bit, so they grow a bit faster; soon they stick out even more, so they grow faster still. Thus branches sprout from the six corners of a hexagonal prism. This process of runaway growth is called the branching instability, and it is responsible for much of the elaborate structure you see in snowflakes. The six branches all grow independently of one another, but they grow alike because each experiences the same external fluctuations in temperature and humidity. The detailed morphology of each falling crystal is determined by the path it takes through the clouds and by the temperature and humidity it experiences along the way. A complex path yields a complex snowflake. Because no two crystals follow precisely the same path through the turbulent atmosphere, no two snowflakes will be exactly alike. When the ice growth is especially hurried, sidebranches appear rather chaotically as the crystal develops. Chaos and order are both present during snow-flake growth, and this is what makes snowflake patterns so intriguing. By itself, the branching instability brings chaos—the unbridled creation of structural complexity, as exemplified by the random sidebranching in a fernlike stellar dendrite. Faceting, on the other hand, brings order, as embodied by the simple perfection of the hexagonal prism. Bring these two forces together, however, and beautifully intricate, symmetrical snowflakes result.
In terms of mathematically modelling the development of snow crystals, the breakthrough came in 2005 when mathematician Clifford Reiter established that cellular automata models of diffusion-limited growth could produce structures that were both faceted and branched, reproducing many features seen in snowflakes. Subsequent work has demonstrated stellar dendrites, capped columns, hollow columns, double plates, and other snowflake types. The construction of each snowflake reflects a quiet clash between order and chaos that plays out within the winter clouds. We still cannot explain why snow crystals grow into broad stellar dendrites at some temperatures while growing into slender ice columns and needles at other temperatures. Figuring out the interaction of two water molecules is doable, but even state-of-the-art computers cannot handle many molecules at once with sufficient accuracy.
We have no walk-in cold room in our lab; with our chest freezer and all our other snow chambers, we keep the cold boxed up so we can work in room-temperature comfort. Basically our photomicroscope is a set of three microscope objectives covering a range of magni-fications attached to a digital camera using a long extension tube. The objectives are mounted on a custom-built turret, making it easy to change magnifications for different snowflakes. Our specimens are almost always on glass slides, and these rest on a translation stage that moves up and down to focus, as is typical with microscopes Another neat trick for producing laboratory snowflakes is to grow them on the ends of electrically induced ice needles. The basic idea is to use strong electric fields to modify the ice growth behavior, a technique that was discovered in 1963 by Basil Mason and his collaborators at Imperial College London. Ken and his colleagues made some advances in this method
With more than seven billion people on the planet, surely a few of us can be spared to look into these matters. Also, you can rest assured that none of your tax dollars have gone into our snowflake projects.
Well, I liked the book. And I liked their overwhelming honesty about what they knew and what they didn't know. It was refreshing and overall, I found I was quite fascinated with what they were doing. Five stars from me.
I've extracted a few segments from the book that caught my attention, as follows:
We name snowflakes for the same reason we name anything—so we can more easily talk about them. Certain snow crystals are common and distinctive looking, and those have fairly well-defined names. Stellar plates, stellar dendrites, fernlike stellar dendrites, hollow columns, and capped columns have all been part of the snowflake vocabulary for some time. Go significantly beyond that, however, and opinions differ. In an effort to be inclusive, perhaps, tables of snowflake types have become larger with time. In the 1940s the largest classification chart included 41 members. This number jumped to 80 in the 1960s, and recently a new table appeared with 121 different snowflake types. The chart the Libbrechts have produced on p27 shows their preferred snowflake classification. Because there can be no such thing as a final, definitive catalog, thy've pared the number down to make a chart that is convenient for snowflake watching. (It's a temperature cvs humidity chart and I recall seeing something similar in Scientific American many years ago.
Typically, cloud droplets must be chilled to somewhere between 21 degrees Fahrenheit (–6 ° C) and 5 degrees Fahrenheit (–15 ° C) before they turn into ice. Remove the dust, and droplets of very pure water can be supercooled to nearly–40 degrees Fahrenheit (–40 ° C) before they freeze. After it leaves the clouds, the snowflake no longer has a ready source of water vapour, so it stops growing. From then on the crystal drifts slowly downward with a typical velocity of around one mile per hour.
About one hundred thousand cloud droplets provide enough water vapour to make a single snowflake. It depends on how well things are mixed in the atmosphere, but there are probably, very roughly, about a thousand of your molecules captured in every snowflake picture.
The art of snowmaking is now so advanced that you can cover your lawn with white anytime and anywhere, even in summer. Compressed air doesn’t have the cooling power to make summertime snow, but liquid nitrogen freezes those droplets with aplomb.
The hands-down favourite snow inducer comes from the bacterium Pseudomonas syringae. This little beasty produces proteins that nucleate freezing at 28 degrees Fahrenheit (–2 ° C), Scientists were studying the bacterium to better understand and mitigate frost damage on crops. But instead, some clever person realized that this microbe’s talents could be harnessed for making artificial snow. The end result is better skiing at a lower price. You never know where science will take you.
Does it ever snow on other worlds? Possibly, but the snowflakes might look quite different from those found on Earth. On Mars, for example, water ice and carbon-dioxide ice (commonly known as dry ice) have both been spotted, and the latter can be several meters thick at the poles. It is still not known, however, if dry ice falls from the Martian atmosphere as “snowflakes” or forms directly on the surface like frost.
In 1611, Kepler presented a small treatise entitled The Six-Cornered Snowflake to his patron, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, as a New Year’s Day gift. He reasoned that each single plant has a single animating principle of its own, since each instance of a plant exists separately, and there is no cause to wonder that each should be equipped with its own peculiar shape. But to imagine an individual soul for each and any starlet of snow is utterly absurd, and therefore the shapes of snowflakes are by no means to be deduced from the operation of soul in the same way as with plants. Because it was known that cannonballs display a hexagonal pattern when stacked in a pile, Kepler conjectured that these two symmetries might be related. There was a germ of truth in this reasoning, because the geometry of stacking atoms lies at the heart of snow crystal symmetry. But the atomistic view of matter had not been developed by Kepler’s time. the word crystal really comes from quartz and Pliny described clear quartz as frozen ice. Pliny’s misunderstanding is still felt in the language of the present day. If you look in your dictionary, you may find that one of the first definitions for crystal is simply “quartz.” This is like saying the definition of food is “potato.” Funny how some quirks in the language remain after thousands of years.
In the crystal world, there are thirty-two possible ways to stack molecules, including five different cubic forms and seven different hexagonal ones. Some symmetries are forbidden—there are no crystal structures with five-fold symmetry, for example. This is true for the same reason you cannot tile your floor with pentagonal tiles; pentagons simply do not fit together without leaving gaps. In the European Union, “lead crystal” must be composed of at least 24 percent lead oxide, while “crystal glass” must include similar amounts of other metal oxides.
Smooth surfaces are difficult to hold onto, while the rough spots have lots of dangling molecular bonds to grab. As a result, the rough spots accumulate molecules quickly, while the smooth surfaces do so more slowly. Before long, the rough areas add water molecules and fill in, leaving only the smooth areas to define the shape of the crystal. These smooth, slower-moving surfaces become the crystal facets. Faceting is an important player in the genesis of snow crystal structure. Faceting explains the formation of simple hexagonal prisms, defining the snow crystal’s six-fold symmetry. But most snowflakes are much more elaborate than simple prisms, so faceting is only part of the story. The six corners of a snow crystal grow a bit faster because they stick out farther into the humid air, causing branches to sprout. As the crystal grows larger, the same effect causes sidebranches to sprout from the faceted corners of each branch. This process is responsible for the complex shapes of snow crystals. The corners experience runaway growth as this cycle accelerates—the corners stick out a bit, so they grow a bit faster; soon they stick out even more, so they grow faster still. Thus branches sprout from the six corners of a hexagonal prism. This process of runaway growth is called the branching instability, and it is responsible for much of the elaborate structure you see in snowflakes. The six branches all grow independently of one another, but they grow alike because each experiences the same external fluctuations in temperature and humidity. The detailed morphology of each falling crystal is determined by the path it takes through the clouds and by the temperature and humidity it experiences along the way. A complex path yields a complex snowflake. Because no two crystals follow precisely the same path through the turbulent atmosphere, no two snowflakes will be exactly alike. When the ice growth is especially hurried, sidebranches appear rather chaotically as the crystal develops. Chaos and order are both present during snow-flake growth, and this is what makes snowflake patterns so intriguing. By itself, the branching instability brings chaos—the unbridled creation of structural complexity, as exemplified by the random sidebranching in a fernlike stellar dendrite. Faceting, on the other hand, brings order, as embodied by the simple perfection of the hexagonal prism. Bring these two forces together, however, and beautifully intricate, symmetrical snowflakes result.
In terms of mathematically modelling the development of snow crystals, the breakthrough came in 2005 when mathematician Clifford Reiter established that cellular automata models of diffusion-limited growth could produce structures that were both faceted and branched, reproducing many features seen in snowflakes. Subsequent work has demonstrated stellar dendrites, capped columns, hollow columns, double plates, and other snowflake types. The construction of each snowflake reflects a quiet clash between order and chaos that plays out within the winter clouds. We still cannot explain why snow crystals grow into broad stellar dendrites at some temperatures while growing into slender ice columns and needles at other temperatures. Figuring out the interaction of two water molecules is doable, but even state-of-the-art computers cannot handle many molecules at once with sufficient accuracy.
We have no walk-in cold room in our lab; with our chest freezer and all our other snow chambers, we keep the cold boxed up so we can work in room-temperature comfort. Basically our photomicroscope is a set of three microscope objectives covering a range of magni-fications attached to a digital camera using a long extension tube. The objectives are mounted on a custom-built turret, making it easy to change magnifications for different snowflakes. Our specimens are almost always on glass slides, and these rest on a translation stage that moves up and down to focus, as is typical with microscopes Another neat trick for producing laboratory snowflakes is to grow them on the ends of electrically induced ice needles. The basic idea is to use strong electric fields to modify the ice growth behavior, a technique that was discovered in 1963 by Basil Mason and his collaborators at Imperial College London. Ken and his colleagues made some advances in this method
With more than seven billion people on the planet, surely a few of us can be spared to look into these matters. Also, you can rest assured that none of your tax dollars have gone into our snowflake projects.
Well, I liked the book. And I liked their overwhelming honesty about what they knew and what they didn't know. It was refreshing and overall, I found I was quite fascinated with what they were doing. Five stars from me.
March 19, 2022
I watched a lecture the author did for the
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and found the topic interesting and the author likable, so I decided to try the book and I wasn't disappointed!
The 2 other books I tried by the author are more focused on snowflake photography and not so much the science:
Snowflakes
The Art of the Snowflake: A Photographic Album
These are very beautiful books that are fun to flip through, but they weren't really what I was looking for. This one includes much more writing – history, science, etc. The science sections are very simple and easy to go through, which on the one hand makes it very readable and fun, but on the other hand also makes it a bit too easy for a reader who is interested in getting slightly more challenging material. I personally would have liked more detailed explanations in the sections on symmetry and faceting during crystal growth and physical morphogenesis (in Chapters 5 and 6), which is the only reason I gave the book 4 stars instead of 5.
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and found the topic interesting and the author likable, so I decided to try the book and I wasn't disappointed!
The 2 other books I tried by the author are more focused on snowflake photography and not so much the science:
Snowflakes
The Art of the Snowflake: A Photographic Album
These are very beautiful books that are fun to flip through, but they weren't really what I was looking for. This one includes much more writing – history, science, etc. The science sections are very simple and easy to go through, which on the one hand makes it very readable and fun, but on the other hand also makes it a bit too easy for a reader who is interested in getting slightly more challenging material. I personally would have liked more detailed explanations in the sections on symmetry and faceting during crystal growth and physical morphogenesis (in Chapters 5 and 6), which is the only reason I gave the book 4 stars instead of 5.
January 28, 2021
Beautifully, and heavily illustrated book. A fascinating time spent reading through this during a snowy couple of days. Perfect book for that. It shares not just the passion that the authors have for their subject, but enough scientific information on snowflakes (their classification, morphology and what factors influences that, as well as what we still don't understand about them) to be a very intriguing read.
December 30, 2024
This would probably be more of a 3.5 but for my fascination of the subject matter.
This author has several books about snow on the market, many with similar names. This one is less photographs -- although still generous with some gorgeous pictures -- and more about the science and art of snow (and similar) crystals. He explains the science in a very approachable way without condescending. It is a little repetitive, but I'm willing to forgive that because of the fantastic photographs.
It was a fun book to read on a snowy day.
This author has several books about snow on the market, many with similar names. This one is less photographs -- although still generous with some gorgeous pictures -- and more about the science and art of snow (and similar) crystals. He explains the science in a very approachable way without condescending. It is a little repetitive, but I'm willing to forgive that because of the fantastic photographs.
It was a fun book to read on a snowy day.
December 28, 2023
The Beauty and Wonder of Snowflakes
Things book helps answer the question “How do snowflakes form?” The authors provide an excellent introduction to the beauty and wonder of snowflakes through answering the above question and through the gorgeous images of snowflakes that are generously featured throughout the book.
Things book helps answer the question “How do snowflakes form?” The authors provide an excellent introduction to the beauty and wonder of snowflakes through answering the above question and through the gorgeous images of snowflakes that are generously featured throughout the book.
April 1, 2019
This book has dense with full-colour photographs of various types of snowflakes and water-crystals. The book is also informative and well-written, explaining how snowflakes form and what variables effect their appearance. A lovely introduction to snowflakes.
December 24, 2022
More snow crystals.
It just goes to show - miracles are everyday ordinary occurances.
We are pretty blind to them by now.
How to re-open our eyes?
This book is a start.
It just goes to show - miracles are everyday ordinary occurances.
We are pretty blind to them by now.
How to re-open our eyes?
This book is a start.
December 9, 2023
Amazingly beautiful and entertaining read -- the science of snow crystals and the story of snowflake enthusiasts
February 27, 2024
Fascinating, beautiful, and a useful reference for budding snowflake-hunters!
January 7, 2017
Fascinating and packs a lot of info into its mere 144 (heavily illustrated) pages, thus proving that concise and plain language is a far better and efficient use of one's text space than showing off with unnecessary syllables and flowery phrases. An excellent beginner's introduction to exactly how snow crystals form and then become snowflakes or one of a myriad of other forms of particles that make up snow. Also includes instructions for capturing and "fossilizing" snowflakes to prevent them melting (hint: involves glass slides and superglue) and photography tips, plus how to make synthetic snowflakes in a chest freezer.
And the photographs! Incredible, beautiful photographs! Even if you don't read a word of this book, it's worth having just for the photographs.
Authors have created Snow Crystals.com which also contains a lot of info and gorgeous photos (some from the book). You'll never be able to look at snow the same way again.
And the photographs! Incredible, beautiful photographs! Even if you don't read a word of this book, it's worth having just for the photographs.
Authors have created Snow Crystals.com which also contains a lot of info and gorgeous photos (some from the book). You'll never be able to look at snow the same way again.
February 2, 2016
Loved this book! If you've ever wanted to know how snowflakes form and why they are shaped the way they are, this is the book to get. Libbrecht and Wing include their own beautiful snowflake pictures, historical pictures of snowflakes, instructions for making snowflake fossils, and tips for photographing snowflakes. This book is an accessible challenge for an older elementary reader. It made my children sad we don't live in a climate where snow ever falls.
January 2, 2016
The authors of this book share their passion for finding and photographing snow crystals, and they have inspired me to do the same!
October 26, 2015
Beautiful book!!
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews