Legal Research

Well, it’s here. Winter, that is. And along with it that white stuff, which has now touched down in most of the country, if only briefly. I thought we might pay a little attention to snow, in particular snow seen up-close (and virtual). But before we get to the flakes, some brute snow facts that might delight the skiers amongst you and cause the rest of us to shudder.

A lot of it falls each year — more than the army could remove, even if called in promptly. An estimate has a million billion cubic feet of snow lands on the planet surface annually, which, when you lift it all in one large ball, weighs that same number of kilograms, i.e. a million billion, which is 1 followed by 15 zeros. Toss that around, if you can. These figures, and more science about snow, come from the LiveScience website.

But let’s change focus and examine the single snow unit, the snowflake, which is a much lighter matter. And a much lovelier thing, if you ask me. Just look at the pictures of these marvellous crystals. Treehugger has a nice slideshow of photos of individual speciments; and CalTech has a gallery of beautiful examples, some of which, we’re told, fell to earth in our own Northern Ontario.

You might like to make your own snowflakes. You can do it in the Highschool Science Project way, thanks to the same CalTech site — which seems a little extreme, given that model volcanoes are easier and more dramatic — or you can simply cut them out of paper according to a series of folds and snips diagrammed online. Still too much of a pain? Okay: you can do the same thing virtually at Make-a-Flake. The scissors are a bit difficult to figure out, but once you get going it’s easy-peasy.