Hasta La Ideas

“These were little plates of ice, very flat, very polished, very transparent, about the thickness of a sheet of rather thick paper… but so perfectly formed in hexagons, and of which the six sides were so straight, and the six angles so equal, that it is impossible for men to make anything so exact.”

The philosopher Rene Descartes made that observation when he attempted to catalogue snowflakes back in 1635, and wound up with a fairly thorough description of snowflake shapes, especially since all he had was the naked eye. See drawings above.

And we’ve experienced the same astonishment as Descartes when we wrote about platinum crystals. There is something about crystals that just looks too unreal.

It needs to be around freezing for water vapor in clouds to form ice crystals and this is when they skip the raindrop phase altogether (although the warmest snow is pretty wet and is the best kind for snowballs.) When the temperature drops below freezing snowflakes become smaller and lighter, and feel more like powder.

But the key to a snowflake’s amazing shape is hexagonal symmetry. Ice crystallizes in a form that is scientifically known as Ice 1h, this means that its base shape is a hexagon, but the interesting part is that if you turn the crystal 60 degrees it maintains a hexagonal shape.

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