Snowflake 954 - a photo on Flickriver

Snowflake 954

Where there’s colour, there’s information. This particular specimen has a lot of knowledge to give due to its sublimative collapse, giving us a unique look into how snowflakes “age”. Before we explore those details, I’d love for you to check out my new snowflake coin design, minted by the Royal Canadian Mint into a pure silver hexagonal coin: www.mint.ca/en/shop/coins/2023/dollar20-pure-silver-hexag...

Thin film interference is the reason for the colours in snowflakes – at least, these sorts of colours. We can also find similar colours in soap film, and the thickness of the film has a direct relation to the colour that is presented. Here’s an amazing resource that describes it, and more importantly, provides a thickness chart that corresponds to the colours: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/380657/soap-film-sudd... . Do you see that colour chart expressed in this snowflake? I certainly do!

Due to sublimation, this snowflake is returning to thin air (evaporating from a solid without first becoming liquid). If it was melting, you’d see little beads of water sitting on top of the crystal. Sublimation happens in the reverse order as crystal growth – whatever sticks out the farthest, sublimates the fastest. This means the outer edges fade away faster, shrinking the footprint of the snowflake quickly. This makes shooting them difficult with the focus stacking nightmare involved, but it doesn’t stop there.

If you pay attention to the lower-left side with its large gradient of colours, it fades to white, which corresponds to roughly 100nm of thickness. 100nm = 0.0001 millimeters. If you look at the lower right area, you’ll notice the same pattern, though slightly more condensed and the stringy-like bubbles on the outer edge have completely collapsed due to external sublimation (the top layer evaporating).

Those stringy-like bubbles, resembling the map of tunnels in an ant farm, I believe are the result of internal sublimation. We have a dance of decay here, both changing the outside and the inside of the snowflake until there is nothing left to admire. How long has this snowflake been sublimating? Hard to say, but those tunnel-complex bubbles would likely take only a few minutes to form under the right conditions. They can begin to form while a snowflake is still in its growth phase, but I have evidence of their formation in this specimen with “before” and “after” shots, measuring only 30 seconds apart. Take a look at that here: donkom.ca/bts/_DKP0171-sublimation-comparison.jpg

The comparison between these two snowflake “states” reveal the constantly-changing nature of the crystal. The colour bands across the bubbles have all changed, with the most prominent gradients reverting to colours representing a much thicker structure. As I had previously suspected, these trapped bubbles shrink in diameter while becoming thicker, leaving a network of bubble tunnels behind them.

Imagine my frustration putting the final focus-stacked image together!

Taken on: January 19, 2019

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Camera: Panasonic DC-S1, 1/160 sec, ISO 400 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Panasonic DC-S1
Exposure Time:	0.006 sec (1/160)
ISO:	400
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	On, Fired
Exposure Program:	Manual
Exposure Mode:	Manual
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Gain Control:	High gain up
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Adobe Photoshop 24.7 (Windows)
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