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Are Snowflakes Really Unique? The Science Behind Whoville & The Grinch
Yes and no, but mostly yes.
A few centuries back, advancements in the art of lens crafting and the innovations of unknown inventors led to the emergence of the microscope. Suddenly, people had a window into the microscopic world all around us. Humans discovered a menagerie of microbes, but we also spent some time staring at snowflakes, observing the diminutive and fleeting artistry of nature.
People (including famed author Dr. Seuss) started to imagine the world of the very small as being as rich and interesting as the macro world. Seuss first introduced young readers to his own microscopic world, the town of Whoville, in the 1954 book Horton Hears a Who! The city existed in a speck of dust resting on a flower. Later, readers and moviegoers returned to Whoville in winter, when the city served as a nucleation point for a snowflake, just one among trillions in a snowfall, and the Grinch (now streaming on Peacock) was busily stealing Christmas.
From our medium-sized perspective, a snowfall usually appears as a featureless mass of white. With so many snowflakes so closely overlapping, the details get lost. A microscope lets you isolate individual flakes and really appreciate their unique characteristics. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, meteorologist Wilson Bentley photographed more than 5,000 individual snowflakes in stunning detail. In all that time, he never found any two which were alike, and he is responsible for the common belief that every snowflake is absolutely unique.
Then again, in a world as wide as ours and with so many snowflakes to choose from, it feels almost impossible that mother nature never reused a design. Which got us wondering…
Is every snowflake absolutely unique?
As with most things, the answer is complicated and a matter of degrees. Whether all snowflakes are unique really comes down to where you draw the line. Snowflakes have been discovered and created which appear to be identical even at a microscopic level. Scientists agree, however, that if we looked deeply enough, we would find differences between them. Those differences are the result of how snowflakes get made.
Snow formation begins when warm, moist air smashes into a cooler air mass. The warm air rises, cools, and its water vapor condenses around dust, bacteria, and other small airborne objects. With something to grow around, ice crystals begin to form until a snowflake is heavy enough for gravity to pull it down. How that crystal structure grows, its shape and evolution, depend on the precise conditions of its formation: the shape and size of its nucleation point (dust, bacteria, etc.), temperature, humidity, and interactions with the environment on its way to the ground. The shape of each snowflake tells you the story of its existence, from the moment it emerged until it landed on your microscope slide.
In nature, even snowflakes which are born in the same storm system, even right next to one another in the same cloud, will experience different journeys on their way to the ground. They’ll experience different microclimates, different temperatures and humidities, different bumps and jostles as they fall. And those journeys will influence the structure of the flake. The only real way for two snowflakes to be identical would be for them to grow under precisely the same conditions.
Have there ever been identical snowflakes?
Yes! Kind of. Kenneth Libbrecht, a scientist from Caltech, has spent years playing with and studying snowflakes. Libbrecht grows snowflakes in the lab under carefully controlled conditions. He’s been able to grow two snowflakes right next to one another under nearly identical conditions. At the end of his process, you end up with two snowflakes of apparently identical size, shape, and organization.
It’s the exception that proves the rule. Libbrecht could only achieve this result by painstakingly controlling environmental conditions. It’s a scenario you can create in the lab, but not one which would ever occur in nature. Furthermore, Libbrecht concedes that while his snowflakes appear to be identical in the microscope, they do have differences if you look closely enough. That he was only able to achieve this level of similarity under such tightly controlled conditions probably settles the question once and for all. The ordinary chaos of weather systems conspires to give each snowflake its own unique experience and its own unique shape. We’re still waiting to find one with tiny people living on it though.
Catch The Grinch streaming now on Peacock.
