In London, where I live, you forget about white Christmas. The best I can hope for is a storm of pathetic flakes. So this year I’m on a mission to make my own snow. It’s not just snow. To maximize the effect of the festival, we want to create the world’s largest snowflake.
It’s going to be a challenge. Guinness World Records Diameter 38cm, thickness 20cm. This incredible phenomenon was recorded in Montana in January 1887, when rancher Matt Coleman reported seeing snowflakes “larger than milk bread” during a violent storm. To be sure, some experts are skeptical. “If this was falling from the sky, they would probably need to wear crash helmets,” said Douglas Mair, a glaciologist at the University of Liverpool in the UK. Nevertheless, Guinness World Records claims that modern sources corroborate the record.
But wait a minute! There is a postscript. The largest snowflake was 10 millimeters. “A snowflake is a single ice crystal,” says Ken Libbrecht, who took the record-breaking photo in Ontario, Canada, in December 2003. The textbook image of a Christmas snowflake is actually a complete snowflake, but a snowflake is made up of several crystals joined together. So you might be able to break the record by creating the world’s largest snowflake instead. How difficult would it be? “You could grow ice crystals from water vapor,” says Libbrecht, whose lab at the California Institute of Technology makes “designer” snowflakes. “But if you want to look like a snowflake, and you want to actually make a symmetrical snowflake, that’s a tall order.” Obviously, I need help.
Source: www.newscientist.com
