17/01/2013
Did you know that each winter one septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) of snow crystals drop from the sky and that it takes about a million little droplets to make one snowflake? As common as it might seem at first glance, snow is actually a very complex type of precipitation. If you wish to know which is the world’s largest snowflake and what is the record for the greatest snowfall. According to specialists,“snowflakes are agglomerates of many frozen ice crystals,most snowflakes are less than one-half inch across”. The water content of snowflakes is more variable than we think. An average snowflake is made up of 180 billion molecules of water, but the snow-water ratio depends on various factors such as temperature, crystal structure, wind speed etc.
Even if there aren’t any images of the biggest snowflake ever recorded, the Guinness Book of World Records states that a giant snowflake was found at Fort Keogh, Montana on January 28, 1887. It was 15 inches wide and 8 inches thick.