Student Essay on Snowflake

Snowflake by Orhan Pamuk

Essay

The beauty and unpredictability of snow is quite disregarded throughout North America. When Americans think of snow they might think of blizzards that knock out power lines or make traveling violent and life-threatening. Others might think of snow as an inconvenience that can ruin plans and make life a hassle. The lighter, happier, and more confident other five percent of the population might look at it as a miracle of nature.

The way that water vapor converts directly to ice when the surrounding temperature is less than -40˚ C is called "homogenous nucleation." The other way that snow can form is called "heterogenous nucleation." This is when the temperature is between -5˚ and -40˚ C and water in the atmosphere freezes and sticks to tiny dust particles. These two processes form a single ice ball that grows and forms six evenly spaced branches. This is how it becomes a snowflake. When one of these snowflakes gets caught up in some warmer air, the snowflake melts just a tiny bit and the water acts like a glue to other snowflakes and soon there can be anywhere from twenty to forty snowflakes "glued" to each other which forms the "fluffy snowflake."

Though this process happens all over the world twenty-four hours a day throughout the year, no two snowflakes are the exactly alike. To some people this is extremely hard to believe. When they think about it they think about the arctic and the billions upon billions of snowflakes that fall each day. The fact that no two snowflakes are alike just boggles some people's minds.

All of the science that goes through creating a single snowflake is extremely overwhelming and unthinkable, but when you relax and sit back, you can appreciate snow and only think about the great things in life.