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Material witness

Close to the edge

Nature Materials volume 15, page 1060 (2016)Cite this article

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Snowflakes are often seen as a paradigm of complexity emerging from simple rules. But in fact the rules are far from simple: they represent an interplay of effects at length scales ranging from the molecular to the macroscopic.

The subtlety of this crystal-growth process becomes apparent from the diversity of morphologies it generates with only slight changes in humidity or temperature. Snowflakes are not always the familiar, intricate six-pointed dendrites: they might also be hexagonal plates or prisms, needles, plates with triangular symmetry, or rather irregular. Ukichiro Nakaya, a pioneer of laboratory-grown snowflakes, memorably called them “letters sent to us from the sky” — but we still don't fully understand how to read them.

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  1. Philip Ball
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Ball, P. Close to the edge. Nature Mater 15, 1060 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4763

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