| Snowflakes are ice crystals which fall through the Earth’s atmosphere as snow. People like to think that every snowflake has a unique shape. However, it’s not true. While snowflakes may look different, they can still be classified into eight groups and about eighty different variants. Some scientists have done a lot of research into making a kind of a catalogue of snowflakes. The most typical patterns for a snowflake are needles, columns, plates and rimes. The shape and the pattern of a snowflake largely depend on the weather conditions. The study of snowflakes has identified that long, thin needle-like ice crystals form at around zero, while a lower temperature will lead to very flat crystals. Further changes in temperature as a snowflake falls determine more complicated shapes of snowflakes. The size of a snowflake also depends on the air temperature. |