A Snowflake’s Journey

Have you ever seen a snowflake? Not those little flicks of barely there snowflakes that melt as soon as they touch you. I’m talking about those fluffy clumps of twenty or so individual snowflakes that have all joined together during their descent from ten thousand feet in the air. The ones that make you think of snow angels and snowball fights and puff when you kick your foot through the fallen sheets of them on the ground.

That just makes me happy! I love it when my foot goes through a plane of freshly fallen snow and it’s all light and soft. When it just flies off the car with barely a wave of your hand rather than needing to hack at it with the long end of the scraper. I know, I know. It won’t get that way if you clean it off right after it falls but still it shouldn’t happen overnight!

Oh well. Back to snowflakes. Those little crystalline pieces of water that start out in clouds ten thousand feet up as just tiny bits of mist hanging around each other that then decide to condense and form a drop. A drop that is just too heavy for the atmosphere to hold up so it starts to plummet to the earth. Did you know that small raindrops can take up to seven minutes to fall? So that little speck of water that hits you on the cheek and makes you look up to check for more of its buddies took four hundred and twenty seconds of diving through the air from thousands of feet up just to splatter on your face and get wiped away.

Talk about a letdown.

Alright so that whole thing was really about raindrops but come on, they’re insane too! Up and down. Up and down. Up and down the water goes. The circle of life…H2O version.

So then snowflakes. Similar enough right? But apparently (after a two second google search) these little fluffernutters start out by latching onto a piece of dust or pollen or some other little shit in the air again ten thousand feet up there. That little piece slowly gets more and more of these tiny little vapors of water grabbing onto it like the only floating piece of wreckage after a shipwreck. And it’s cold!

There’s a reason I keep emphasizing ten thousand feet. I’ve been up there. In the summer.

In short sleeves. Staring down at the ground way, way down below. And it wasn’t tank top weather. And again, that was in the summer. Sure, it wasn’t freeze your nipples off either but considering that it was hot enough to start sweating when I hit the ground ten minutes later, I’m betting ten thousand feet up is not a fun experience when the ground temperature is 0F.

Anyone ever take a chemistry class? Or a general science class? Well, for those who haven’t let me give you a quick rundown on the phases of matter. You’ve got solid, liquid, and gas. For H2O that means ice, water, and steam. Then you basically think about it this way.

Ice is cold, water is warmer, steam is hot! Heat is energy!

So steam is like a little kid who stole Santa’s entire cookie tray Christmas morning and is now bouncing on their parents’ bed demanding presents. Ice is like the parents who were up all night wrapping last minute presents and sneaking them down under the tree trying to steal five more minutes before forcing open their blurry eyes. And water is like the older sibling who wants their new bike but knows it will still be there after they get those last few hours of shut eye.

To go from one stage to the other you have to either add or subtract energy. All those little bits of H2O in the atmosphere latching onto each other on that little particle going from a gas to a solid happens because they are cold, cold, cold. i.e. low on energy.

Then these cold, cold, cold particles of water crystalize and form a single one of those preciously unique snowflakes. (Really, how unique can they be? We make trillions of these things each year. Whatever differences we’re counting here are so minute I’m pretty sure we should give up trying to find them. But apparently that’s what the math says.) Eventually, the crystalized water we call a snowflake drops. It leaves its little spot in the atmosphere and starts falling that long, long journey to earth.

And it isn’t even a straight shot!

Consider all the wind blowing from the ground to ten thousand feet up! Just try to imagine how many times that little flake of snow (that was sooo not made to be aerodynamic) is tossed this way and that, up and down. Just how many loops do you think it does in the air before it actually gets anywhere? Can you imagine being an H2O molecule on that flake?

Talk about a flight from hell!

And then it gets close to the ground. Maybe it lands in a field and that’s that. Or lands in a field and gets trampled or shat on by a deer, I mean, anything can happen. Or it lands on a car and the next morning is attacked by scrapers with a vengeance for just doing what it does. Or it lands on a road and gets plowed into a snowbank unless it’s one of the few lucky ones that’s left behind to be covered in salt that sinks into it and breaks up all the tight knit bonds each H2O molecule has with its buddies like atomic Yokos.

But maybe, just maybe it gets packed tight with millions of its compatriots and rolled into one boulder of snow to be packed atop another boulder of snow and another on top of it. Then it has a carrot, and some rocks join it as well as some sticks and maybe a scarf and a hat. And when everything’s been put in and on and around them, they all stand tall as children laugh and play around them.

That to me sounds like a very nice fate for a snowflake. At least better than the deer option.

#TLCC