How often, in the midst of the usual hustle and bustle, we do not notice the beautiful, we are not surprised by the small miracles that are very close by. You just have to lend a hand. And last hot summer was a dream for us.
Once again, digging out their car, motorists complain about snowy weather, extreme sportsmen remember skiing with a breeze, and children joyfully frolic in snowdrifts, make snowmen and ride down hills. Kids see a real miracle in the snow and rejoice in it from the bottom of their hearts. But snow really is a unique creation of nature!
Scientists have calculated that each cubic meter of snow contains about 350 million snowflakes and, most surprisingly, none of them repeat the other. Snowflakes are not only unique, but also have an ideal harmonious design, representing a truly fantastic example of the self-organization of matter from simple to complex.
All of them have a hexagonal shape, there are no five-pointed snowflakes (this is an invention of Soviet artists). Another famous mathematician of the XVII century. Johannes Kepler was struck by a small dot found in the middle of a snowflake, as if it were a trace from the leg of a compass. The scientist devoted a whole scientific treatise "New Year's gift" to snowflakes.
For centuries, snowflakes have been studied, viewed under a microscope, and photographed. Japanese scientist Nakaya Ukichiro was the first to classify snowflakes.
All snow crystals are divided into several groups:
- records
- columns with tips
- stellate dendrites
- columns
- spatial dendrites
- irregular shapes
What determines the shape of snowflakes? Due to the different ratio of heat and moisture, the same crystals acquire a different shape, but at the same time retain symmetry. There are "crippled" snowflakes - those that fell into the turbulence zone during the flight and broke or lost some of their branches.
A snowflake weighs about a milligram, very large snowflakes 2-3 mg. The largest snowflakes in the world were recorded in 1944 on April 30 in Moscow. They covered the palm of their hand and looked like ostrich feathers.
However, billions of snowflakes, each of which is practically weightless, can even affect the speed of the Earth's rotation. Typically, during the northern hemisphere winter, the entire mass of the globe increases due to snow cover by about as much as 13,500 billion tons. White, shiny snow is able to deprive the Earth of solar heat, as it reflects about 90% of solar energy back into space.
Snowflakes are 95% air, so they have a low density and a slow fall speed (about 0.9 km per hour). Skipping the rain stage, snowflakes are formed from steam (to find out this fact alone, American scientists spent 26,400,000 dollars).
The first person who managed to photograph snowflakes, Wilson Bentley, a farmer from the USA, published in 1931 an album with these unique photographs (2500 pictures in total). How are snowflakes photographed? To capture this miracle of nature, it is necessary to place snowflakes not on a microscope glass (then they lose their beautiful outlines even in the cold), but on a thin silk mesh like a cobweb, just then they can be photographed in all its glory, and the mesh is subsequently retouched.
In Japan, on the island of Hokkaido, there is a snowflake museum - the only one in the world named after Nakaya Ukichiro.
Knowing amazing facts about snowflakes, not only children, but also adults will be able to look at this wonderful phenomenon with completely different eyes. Moreover, Russians should appreciate this opportunity, because according to statistics, more than half of the world's population has never seen snow in their lives, and we can rejoice at it and consider it every day. 🙂
If you don't have snow at the moment or don't feel like leaving the house, you can make beautiful paper snowflakes. And the video tutorial by Svetlana Bobrovskaya will tell you how to do it right.
graceful beauty snowflakes
In normal snowfall we do not think that an ordinary snowflake, when studied under a microscope, can be a wonderful sight and amaze us with the correctness and complexity of forms. snowfall consists of such beauty.
By the way, the snow itself is not only white. In arctic and mountainous regions, pink or even red snow is common. The fact is that the algae living between its crystals color entire areas of snow. But there are cases when snow fell from the sky already colored - in blue, green, gray and black.
Yes, for Christmas 1969 in Sweden fell black Snow. Most likely, this happened due to the fact that during the fall, the snow absorbed soot and industrial pollution from the atmosphere. In any case, laboratory testing of air samples revealed the presence of the insecticide DDT in the black snow.
Mathematics was especially struck by the “tiny white dot” he found in the middle of the snowflake, as if it were the trace of the leg of a compass, which was used to outline its circumference.
The great astronomer Johannes Kepler in his treatise "New Year's gift. About hexagonal snowflakes" explained the shape of crystals the will of God. The Japanese scientist Nakaya Ukichiro called snow "a letter from heaven, written in secret hieroglyphs."
He was the first to create a classification of snowflakes. The only one in the world named after Nakaya snowflake museum located on the island of Hokkaido.
Complex star snowflakes have a unique, eye-catching geometric shape. And there are more variants of such forms, according to physicist John Nelson from Ritsumeikan University (Japanese) in Kyoto, than there are atoms in the observable Universe.
During the snowfall in 1987 in Fort Coe (Montana, USA) a snowflake was found - a world record holder with a diameter of 38 cm.
The fact that one snowflake is practically weightless, any of us knows very well: just put your palm under the falling snow.
An ordinary snowflake weighs about a milligram(very rarely 2-3 milligrams), although there are exceptions - the largest snowflakes fell on April 30, 1944 in Moscow. Caught in the palm, they covered it almost entirely and resembled ostrich feathers.
More than half of the world's population has never didn't see snow except in photographs.
A layer of one centimeter of snow packed over the winter gives 25-35 cubic meters of water per 1 ha
Snowflakes are made up of 95% from air, which causes a low density and a relatively slow fall velocity (0.9 km/h).
Snow can be eaten. True, the energy consumption for eating snow is many times greater than its calorie content.
A snowflake is one of the most fantastic examples of the self-organization of matter from simple to complex.
In the Far North, the snow is so hard that the ax, when struck, rings like it was hit on iron.
The forms of snowflakes are unusually diverse - there are more than five thousand of their variations. Even a special international classification has been developed, in which snowflakes are combined into ten classes. These are stars, plates, columns, needles, hail, tree-like crystals resembling fern stalks. The dimensions of the winter miracle range from 0.1 to 7 millimeters.
The crunch of the snow- it's just the noise from the crushed crystals. Of course, the human ear cannot perceive the sound of one "broken" snowflake. But myriads of crushed crystals create quite a distinct creak. Snow creaks only in frost, and the tone of the creak changes depending on the air temperature - the stronger the frost, the higher the tone of the creak. The scientists made acoustic measurements and found that there are two gentle and not pronounced maxima in the spectrum of snow creaking - in the range of 250-400 Hz and 1000-1600 Hz.
Snowflakes viewed under a microscope are the miraculous handiwork of God. Each crystallized raindrop - and this is snow - has a certain systematic pattern with countless varieties - several of them are shown in the figure.
In the snow we don't think that an ordinary snowflake under a microscope is a beautiful sight and amazes with the correctness and complexity of the form. Snowflakes look like roses, lilies and wheels with six teeth. He was particularly struck by the “tiny white dot” he found in the middle of the snowflake, as if it were the trace of the leg of a compass, which was used to outline its circumference.
Dear readers, hello! We have a new, well, very entertaining project. All of us have caught small white parachutes falling from the sky on mittens or in warm palms, and sometimes right in our mouths! But where do these patterned ice crystals come from, and do you know what snowflakes are?
Lesson plan:
How do snowflakes appear?
Snowflakes exist in nature thanks to water vapor. From the accumulation of water rain falls in the summer, but in winter the cold air freezes small droplets of water and as a result it snows.
How does this fragile miracle come about? The beginning of each patterned crystal is given by its middle - the core, which can be any speck of dust from the cloud. This speck of dust, as it moves through the clouds, is overgrown with transparent ice crystals, which give it a certain shape. Gradually, so many crystals are glued that the weight of the dust particle makes it fall to the ground.
If you carefully consider the patterns of snowflakes falling from the sky, you can easily notice that none of them is similar to the other.
Interesting Facts! An ordinary snowflake weighs about 1 milligram, rarely 2 or 3. But the most Bolshukhansky ones fell in 1944 in Moscow. You can't even call them snowflakes. The size of a palm, they looked more like ostrich feathers.
Why are snowflakes different?
The question of why ice crystals fall from the sky in different shapes has always been of interest to scientists. The first to think about their structure was the German astronomer Kepler. He wondered why pentagonal or heptagonal snowflakes did not fall from the sky.
The French mathematician Descartes first made a detailed description of what ice crystals might look like and divided them into groups. Rare forms are mentioned in his works.
When the microscope was invented, English physicist Hooke published graphic images of snowflakes, showing all the unique intricate patterns of the natural wonder.
Russian photographer Sigson even managed to take a photo of about two hundred different snowflakes. But the real snow pioneer of photography was the American Bentley, who took 5,000 pictures in his life, of which 2,500 were included in the book Snow Crystals.
Japanese physicist Nakaya learned how to grow snowflakes in the lab. He poetically called them letters from heaven.
As a result of the work of scientists from different countries, it became clear that
- in nature there is no other form of snowflakes, except for hexagonal,
- the species depends on the environment in which the ice crystal is born,
- among the factors affecting the shape are air temperature and humidity,
- the simplest patterns appear when the air is not very humid,
- the higher the percentage of humidity and air temperature, the more complex and beautiful the snowflake turns out.
- the angle between the beams can be either 60 or 120 degrees.
Interesting Facts! A snowflake falling on the water creates a high pitched sound. A person, of course, does not hear him, but, as scientists say, such noise is extremely unpleasant for fish.
Now you know where snowflakes come from and why they are different. All ice crystals were conventionally divided into seven simple groups and given their conventional names.
Plate
The simplest of all, thin and flat. She has many edges that divide the crystal into parts.
Column
These snowflakes, resembling a hollow hexagonal pencil, are the most common of all shapes. It can be blunt or pointed at the ends.
Column with a tip
This type is obtained if an ordinary column falls into certain conditions under which the crystal changes the direction of its growth and gradually turns into a plate at the ends. For example, this happens when moving to another temperature zone under the influence of wind.
Needle
This is a kind of columnar snowflake that has grown thin and long. It happens that they have a cavity inside, but sometimes they open at the ends in the form of branches.
Stars
This specimen has a beautiful branching silhouette that we love to admire. It has six absolutely symmetrical main rays and many different branches. They are about 5 mm in size and are usually flat.
Spatial dendrites
Amazing patterned crystals are voluminous due to the combination of various other types.
Wrong snowflakes
Yes, there is also such a group, which includes damaged representatives who, on the way to us, damaged their twigs or completely broke into pieces. Such crippled snowflakes are usually obtained in strong winds, there are many of them in wet snow.
Remember, we said that different forms are obtained under different conditions? So here it is
- stars are usually obtained at temperatures down to -5 degrees,
- but the needles - from -5 to -10,
- for complex dendrites, the temperature should be at least -10 and not lower than -20 degrees,
- but plates and columns of different sizes are formed even with air at -35.
Interesting Facts! It is estimated that half of the inhabitants of the Earth have never seen snowflakes. But they have a chance to come north or visit the world's only snowflake museum in Japan on the island of Hokkaido.
Here is an interesting project we have today. Look to us more often, there is still a lot of interesting things in the world to tell about!
By the way, we have already talked about many interesting things. For example, about . we got acquainted with winter folk signs, and learned more about ball lightning.
Evgenia Klimkovich.
It's summer right now! And there seemed to be no question of snow, but still I want to tell you interesting facts about this climatic phenomenon.
What is snow?
Snow is nothing but frozen water. However, in that case, why doesn't it look like ice? The fact is that snowflakes are actually made of small ice crystals, and because the light reflects off their many facets, the snowflakes appear white instead of transparent. Snow is formed when water vapor in the atmosphere freezes. At first, tiny crystals appear, clean and transparent. Following the air currents, they move in the air in all directions. Gradually, these crystals “stick” to each other until there are a hundred or even more of them. When the size of the frozen ice floes is large enough, they begin to slowly sink to the ground. These accumulations of ice floes are what we call snowflakes.
1. As you know, snow does not fall all over the globe, because nature has taken care of the temperature conditions of some countries. That is why more than half of the people that inhabit our planet have not seen snow live in their lives. Unless from a photograph, or visited snowy countries.
2. Of all the snow that has fallen on the entire globe, there will not be a single snowflake that repeats in structure!
3. Snowflakes are 95% air. That is why they fall very slowly, at a speed of 0.9 km / h.
4. Why is snow white? Because snow has air in its structure. In this case, all kinds of light rays are simply reflected from the border of ice crystals with air and scattered.
But in history there have been cases when snow of a different color fell. For example, in Switzerland in 1969, black snow fell, just in time for Christmas, and in 1955, green snow fell on California. The saddest thing in this story is that the residents who tasted this snow died in the near future, and those who took green snow in their hands got severe itching and a rash on their hands. This is probably why we are forbidden to eat yellow snow.
But the snow is not so snow-white everywhere. For example, in Antarctica and high mountains, snow of pink, purple, red and yellowish-brown color is found. This is facilitated by creatures that live in the snow and are called snow chlamydomonas.
5. 1 cm of snow cover, which covers our Earth during the winter, gives a full-fledged 25-35 cubic meters of water per 1 hectare. Perhaps people will soon come up with some devices for collecting snow and using it in the future. Somewhere in the industry, or as industrial water for field irrigation, flushing in public toilets, etc. Etc. Or maybe they will learn to separate the water and chemicals in the snow.
6. When a snowflake falls into the water, it emits a high-frequency sound that is not picked up by humans, but according to scientists, the fish population of the river really does not like it.
7. Snow, under normal conditions, melts at 0 degrees Celsius. However, a significant amount of snow can evaporate at sub-zero temperatures, bypassing the transformation into a liquid phase. This process occurs when the sun's rays hit the snow.
8. In winter, snow reflects up to 90% of the sun's rays from the Earth's surface, directing them back into space. Thus preventing the Earth from warming up.
9. Approximately at temperatures below -2-5 degrees Celsius, a creak is heard when walking in the snow. And the colder the temperature, the stronger this creak is heard. And there are two reasons for this: firstly, the sound appears when the snow crystals break, and secondly, when the crystals slide against each other under the pressure that you create.
10. The largest snowflake in the entire world has been witnessed in history. During a snowfall in 1987 on January 28 in Fort Coy (Montana, USA), the snowflake found had a diameter of 38 cm. And this despite the fact that ordinary snowflakes have an average diameter of 5 mm.
Why are snowflakes hexagonal while snow is white? And other interesting facts about snowflakes that you did not even know about. Bonus: double snowflake template.
Again winter - snowfall, cold and snowdrifts.
But do not rush to despair, everything is much more interesting!
Take a closer look at the snow, because it is not just an atmospheric phenomenon, but an amazing masterpiece of the art of nature.
1. Formed in the sky from microscopic drops of water and dust particles.
2. They are a bizarrely assembled structure of ice crystals, mainly in the form of hexagonal stars or plates.
Although there are exceptions.
3. As they approach the earth, as a result of the condensation of water from the air, they grow and acquire their own unique shape.
4. They live only in flight!
Having descended from the sky, the snowflake crystals stop growing and almost immediately begin to lose their clarity of edges.
5. Snowflakes have a hexagonal shape due to the corresponding structure of the water crystal.
6. New crystals are sequentially attached to the tops of the base crystal, thereby creating a symmetrical hexagonal structure.
7. When falling from a height, the crystals repeatedly melt and solidify again, as a result of which the ideal geometric structure is violated. But since the crystallization of all six rays takes place under the same conditions, all the rays of one snowflake are almost identical.
8. Nature has boundless imagination and inexhaustible imagination, so you will never see two identical snowflakes.
9. Depending on the surrounding conditions, elongated snowflakes (column snowflakes and needle snowflakes) or our favorite openwork hexagons are formed.
10. At extremely low temperatures (below minus thirty degrees Celsius), snow falls in the form of the so-called "diamond dust" - snow needles, which, settling on the ground, create the most fluffy snowdrifts.
11. Snowflakes are 95 percent air.
12. It is due to the presence of air, which scatters light waves, that snow is white.
13. The speed of a snowflake falling is 0.9 kilometers per hour.
14. The average size of snowflakes is 5 millimeters, and the weight is only 4 thousandths of a gram.
15. Cases of giant snowflakes with a diameter of more than 30 cm have been recorded.
16. A cubic meter of snow contains about 350,000,000 unique snowflakes.
17. Snow creaks at temperatures below minus 5 degrees. Mainly due to the breaking of the crystals. At a higher temperature, the snow does not break when squeezed, but melts - and therefore does not creak.
18. Exist. You can always find them in the cozy shop of fine accessories MECHTASHOP.
19. The only snowflake museum in the world is located on the Japanese island of Hokkaido.
20. More than half of the inhabitants of our planet have never seen snow live. But I really want to see a real miracle of nature ...
Beautiful paper snowflakes can come to the rescue.
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