and it is generally not possible to explain why even simple crystals develop their characteristic shapes. A case in point is the snow crystal, which grows into a puzzling variety of unusual ...

That bent light keeps traveling through the snowflake. Some of the light will hit different parts of the snowflake and bounce ...

but these are freshly fallen snowflakes, or snow crystals, resting on wool. They are around 1 millimeter in size and were captured using a simple, cheap photography technique. When the snow starts ...

Snow crystals are then created ... temperatures result in lower moisture levels in the atmosphere. For some background, cold air sinks while warm air rises. If there is not enough lift, snow ...

The largest snow crystal ever measured was 10 millimetres across, discovered by Kenneth Libbrecht, who photographed the record-breaker in Ontario, Canada, in December 2003. Libbrecht is a ...