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We looked to the skies to understand what makes each delicate snowflake take on a unique shape. On a typical blustery winter day, brewing snow clouds are heavily saturated with water molecules. As the clouds get heavier, water droplets form, freeze, and then turn into snowflakes. The size, shape, and texture of the flakes depend on many environmental factors, including temperature, humidity, and which way the winds are blowing. Let's say an imaginary snow cloud is hanging over the Himalayas, where the temperature reads -15°F in a blizzard. In these stormy conditions, ice crystals tend to form in solid prisms and will most likely produce thick dendrite
flakes. On the same day over New York's Central Park, the clouds are not as high and it's only slightly windy. Our snow cloud is less dense because of the warmer weather, so it will now produce long, needle-like crystals at 23°F. Over Germany's Black Forest, it's 20° colder without a lick of wind at the center of our snow machine. Here, our cloud will probably spit out a few hexagonal hollow prisms. Not only are snowflakes from different regions unique, but even flakes formed in the very same cloud will vary. Their shape is extremely dependent upon where they form in the cloud and the temperature changes each flake experiences as it is forming. On
a microscopic level, the formation of the crystals is a complex process, and it leads to an almost infinite number of possible variations. In theory, two snowflakes could be precisely the same, yet the probability of complex water molecules in two different snowflakes being distributed in the exact same configuration is next to zero. Even among billions and billions of crystals, the odds are unlikely. That's what leads scientists to view each of these transparent jewels as a one-of-a-kind masterpiece.
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