Short Stuff: Unique Snowflakes

Amazingly, it turns out that every snowflake truly is unique. Math backs it up. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
there's Jerry, and this is the abbreviated version of stuff
you should know short stuff, that's right, And this one
we're gonna talk about uh as as dumb hippie liberals.
We're gonna talk about our favorite thing, snowflakes. Oh man,

(00:25):
it's funny how that guy co opted because I think
it's quite a compliment. I'm like, yeah, I am an individual.
I don't know, I am a unique. You want to
know what you do when somebody calls you a snowflake?
You just smile and twirl to show them all you
got and say, who doesn't love snowflakes? Love being a snowflake?
So here's the deal. But the whole point of this
uh fourteen minutes that you're gonna undertake with us is

(00:49):
the old um not wives tale, because it's true, the
old notion that snowflakes are actually unique, every single snowflake
is actually unique. And the answer to that, we're happy
to say is yes, it certainly seems to be the case. Yeah,
it's awesome. I feel like we've done something on this,
like maybe in one of our short videos before something

(01:10):
like that, But I wonder if we said the opposite.
But now that we did this research, I'm like, how
could we possibly have said the opposite. It's just not
it's not possible. Yeah, I mean we we should say
that a lot of snowflakes, and we're gonna go through
how they're they're formed. But in the very early stages
snowflakes can be pretty identical and and even in the

(01:31):
end sometimes they can be similar. But technically they are
all unique because so many different things can affect each
individual snowflake along the way that there's just no way
that they could be the same. Yeah. It takes a
mind boggling number of factors and inputs, each of which
variables I guess you'd call them, each of which can
change and just changed to one of them, got a

(01:54):
different snowflake, changed to a couple, it got an even
more different snowflake. There's just so many, so many different
things that go into making a snowflake that, yeah, it's
it's just not possible that they're not all unique. But
to understand all this, you have to understand how a
snowflake is made. And by golly, Chuck and I are
just the people to tell you all right, So we
did some. I think it was our our happy Clouds

(02:16):
episode which was really terrific quite a few years ago,
which you can refer to if you want a longer explanation.
But um, when when rain or in this case snow
falls out of the sky, it starts down on the
surface of the earth, um as water that evaporates from
our lakes, our oceans are rivers, rises up into the
atmosphere as water vapor, and sometimes that can form a

(02:41):
happy puffy cloud. It can and then depending on the
type of cloud, and if it's cold enough, which it
usually is, some of that water vapor will condense around,
say like a piece of dust or something like that.
It will condense in from water vapor which is a gas,
into liquid which is a liquid water, and usually it

(03:03):
does it around like a piece of dust or something
that that nucleates it. But what what another way to
say it is it reaches its dew point, the point
where the temperature where it changes from vapor into liquid.
And as it does that, if it's cold enough, it
will then turn into ice. And what you have is
basically the the beginning standard template of a snowflake, which

(03:25):
if you stopped and said, okay, right, now, are all
snowflakes alike? You would say, yeah, they're actually they're they're
pretty similar. Sure, we'll go with that. But that's just
like the beginning of the snowflake. It's the basis of it.
It's the, like I said, the template that all snowflakes
start from. And it's usually just a little six sided
hexagonal plate. Yeah. So you have these little tiny ice crystals. Uh,

(03:48):
they start floating around in the sky and smashing and
colliding with other water vapor molecules along the way, and
every time it does that, it collects. Uh well, yeah,
I guess it collects. It sort of con tacks these
crystals and it sort of just starts collecting this stuff
and getting a little more solid and a little more
substantial all around that little original nucleus that was where

(04:12):
they were all similar to one another. Right. And then
so this snowflake, as it's kind of moving around up
in the atmosphere like I'm building, I'm growing, it runs
into other water vapor, and that water vapor rather than
going through the trouble of moving from a gas to
a liquid to a solid, which is you know, an
ice crystal it just it. It goes through what's called deposition.

(04:35):
It goes straight from water vapor into a solid and
attaches to that snowflake template. And as it does so, um,
it will start to form some of the more intricate
details of that snowflake. And that happens again and again
and again and again, and you get layer after layer
after layer of ice crystals forming on this plate, and

(04:57):
all of a sudden, you have like arms that account
and those arms stick to get detailed. Now the snowflake
is starting to take shape. So you've got water vapor
that freezes and starts to attract other water vapor that
freezes onto it, that starts to give snowflakes their size
and their shape. But there's lots more variables involved. That's right,

(05:19):
And we'll take a little break here. We're gonna come
back and talk about the remaining formation of snowflakes read
after this. M M all right. So you mentioned that

(05:48):
it was hexagonal or did you say hexagonal? I think
I said hexagonal like a dumb dumb uh. And so
you know, you've got these little arms sticking out, and
sometimes on the edge of these arms are a little jagged. Uh.
It's sort of like jagged like a serrated knife. And
these uneven areas as you know, exactly what you think.

(06:09):
Because they're uneven and stuff sticking out a little farther,
it's gonna attract even more water molecules than it would
if it was smooth and uniform like other parts of
that same snowflake. So that's how you build out. When
you think of like or if you see a you know,
a microscopic view of a snowflake, Uh, those are what
those little arms and those little jagged crystal sticking off

(06:31):
that make it so beautiful. That's what's going on there, right,
And like you said, because these arms are kind of
like sticking out there, they're attracting more and more water
vapor that's sticking to them, and it's building out and
growing out into this um larger, more intricate, more detailed
crystalline structure. So once you have those arms, it seems

(06:52):
to be almost like, uh, I don't want to say
a tipping point, you know why, but um, that is
what happens, and all of a sudden, the snowflakes starts
to really take shape. Yeah, and here's where the environment
comes into play, because depending on a lot of different
factors like, uh, temperature obviously humidity, um like really really

(07:12):
really cold temperature that will really vary what kind of
snowflakes like size and shape that you're gonna get. Yeah,
And I was like why temperature. So temperature is a
measure of the um the movement the energy of like
uh like molecules or atoms or whatever, right, but I
couldn't figure out why the lower the temperature, the more
intricate the snowflake got. Yeah, what is that? Everything I

(07:36):
saw was just basically like, that's just the way it is. Yeah,
So that's what we're gonna have to go with you. Basically,
is this is the way it is. If you understand
why that is the case, please tell us because we
want to know. Right. But like those when you think
of those, uh they describe it as fern like arms,
like those awesome looking arms with all the little jagged

(07:57):
things sticking off. That's when it's like prime snowflake time,
when it's super super cold, right precisely, um so, uh,
you've got extra moisture, like if it's a little more humid,
that that's gonna affect the shape of the snowflake. It's
gonna make them fatter usually and then lower temperature. So
if you've got somehow higher higher humidity, lower temperature, that's

(08:21):
when you get your true money snowflakes that people like
put on the cover of National Geographic Yeah, lower humidity
is flatter, um higher is fatter, Right, That's that's the
rhyme that I was raised with. Uh And and like
you said, if it's super humid and super cold, that's

(08:43):
that's the rock star. Yes, So okay, that's the physics
of making a snowflake. There's all those different variables. There's
some other ones to Like, snowflakes that are forming will
collide with one another, then some of their arms will
break off, so they'll that will then attract even more crystals.
So that's going to change the shape and of it.

(09:03):
Um the different conditions that form that are all factors
and variables in the forming of a snowflake. All of
those things change from cubic centimeter cubic millimeter of air
um between one next to another. So snowflake that forms
in this one part of is passing through this one
part of the atmosphere is going to be subject to
these variables. But the same variables will be totally different,

(09:26):
you know, a couple of cubic centimeters over. So you've
got all these different variables that are are coming into it,
and apparently when you add these variables up, it becomes
a there becomes a mind boggling number of different possible
combinations of snowflakes, shapes, and crystalline structure, so much so

(09:48):
that it just seems basically impossible that the over the
current age of the universe, certainly over the current age
of Earth, that enough snowflakes have fallen that two of
them could ever have been Like, yeah, so they estimate
um as many as a quintillion quintillion number of molecules

(10:09):
or quintillion molecules in a single snowflake, and that the
possible combinations of all these molecules and potential combinations are
two times as many as atoms as there are atoms
in the entire universe. So I look that up. Is
that could that be possible? That's that's what this article says.

(10:32):
The number of atoms in the universe is either between
ten to the seventy eight power and ten to the
eighties second power total atoms in the universe, which is
between ten quadrillion vigintillion and no, I swear to God
and a hundred thousand quadrillion vigintilions atoms, so twice that

(10:54):
twice that he literally decided like like a ten year
old quintillion bill basically, so that that there's that many
different possible combinations of snowflakes um and that's just the structure.
If you take into account the different the different water
molecules that come together, what time span would it take

(11:17):
for enough snowflakes to fall and enough of this this
this snowflake formation to happen, that all of those same
water molecules happened to come together again, and that snowflake
happens to take the same form because it's exposed to
the same variables. It's just it probably will never ever
ever happen. Yeah, I mean, a tiny fleck of dust

(11:38):
can change the crystals. Uh. The angle where you know
we're talking about how they collide with one another. It's
it's like a car crash. If you get t boned,
your cars are going look different than if you get
hit head on. It's the same. They're depending on the
angle in which they collide that's going to change the
shape of the snowflake, so it really seems true that
there may have never been to snowflake e exactly like

(12:01):
in the end, you may be the first human being
to ever use a car crash to illustrate how snowflakes
can be different. Oh goodness. Uh, so that's why everyone,
you can go around and feel very confident explaining to
all of your friends and co workers and loved ones
that it is true no two snowflakes are like. They're

(12:22):
all unique and different. Uh. And if you want to
get in touch with us about this, you can go
onto our website stuff we Should Know dot com, check
out our social links there, and you can send us
an email to stuff podcast how Stuff Works dot com.