In 2012, I gave a "science cafe" talk with a local series sponsored by the Pacific Science Center, KCTS public television, and Science on Tap. The title was "The curious world of ice and snow". The location was a bar in Kirkland, but open to all ages. When I showed up with my family, they tried to seat us in the backup room, the regular room having filled up, but I said "Oh, well I'm the speaker" and they kindly created a space for my family in the regular room. I was indeed surprised at the crowd. People are apparently more interested in ice than I thought. (Hmm, but where are they when I post here?)

Click on any image to see an enlargement.

The basic structure of each talk was to give a lecture of about 30 minutes and then allow up to an hour (I think) for the Q&A. In my excitement, I had created 41 slides, in retrospect too many for the allotted time.

Given all the time spent preparing the slides, I hope that by posting them here that even more folks can enjoy the images and discussions. But, instead of unloading all of them on you at once, I will break the discussion into three sections. By adding the following table of contents, each section will have 14 new slides and the total will be 42, which according to Douglas Adams* is a really special number.


The contents of this section is part "1", written in green font.

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Last October, I gave a talk at the University of Washington about our recent experiments and ideas about snow-crystal growth. My pitch was general and short, as few folks work in this area and I'd hate to bore them with a long lecture. So, I was delighted to see quite a few graduate students in the audience, some of them asking good questions.

Instead of giving the narrated presentation here as a video, I will give the slides (23) with brief explanations similar to what was spoken at the talk. Narration below each slide. Skip to the ones that look interesting, and click on them to enlarge.

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Last July, I attended the AMS (American Meteorological Society) 15th Conference on Cloud Physics, which was combined with a similar conference on atmospheric radiation. They have these about every four years, but I have missed all those going back to 1995. So, I had a lot to catch up on. Actually, by far the most enjoyable part of this conference was meeting old colleagues and making new acquaintances, including many who I had known only through their papers and email correspondence. As to why I waited so long, I suppose the main reasons were time and cost. Even without travel and lodging expenses, conferences are expensive. This one was $600, and the fee for the abstract I submitted was an additional $95. But in this case, the conference was only a 3-hr drive away (Vancouver, BC) and my co-worker very nicely picked up the conference fee and hotel tab. Also, this conference had a special session dedicated to the work of my former advisor, Prof. Marcia Baker. In that session, I presented the following poster.

I've described a little about corner pockets in a previous post, and showed a few of these panels before, but will briefly go over them here.

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As I mentioned in my previous post, the formation of corner pockets on ice crystals is inexplicable by the standard theory of snow-crystal growth. Akira Yamashita had recently proposed a mechanism for corner pockets, though he had applied it to a different situation. In his case, he observed the early growth stage of a relatively large frozen droplet as it transitions into a faceted crystal. So, his situation dealt with a round crystal becoming sharp-edged. In our case, we started with a large sharp-edged crystal, then made it become round by sublimating (analogous to evaporation, but for a crystal), and finally made the crystal re-sharpen by growing it. The process is sketched below. You may want to open the image in another window and enlarge it.

At the top, you see the simple hexagonal prism crystal in its initial stage. At stage B, the crystal sublimates (we reduced the amount of vapor), meaning that it is starting to shrink. The shrinking starts from the corners, making them become rounded. Then, in stage C, we start growing the crystal again, and the interesting things start to happen.

As the water molecules from the vapor stick to the surface, they remain mobile on the surface. On the surface, they wander around until latching into a little nook. (In crystal-growth theory, these 'nooks' are actually tiny kinks in a surface step.) The region just over the edge has plenty of nooks, as it is rounded. So, the edge grows fast and starts to protrude and overhang (stage D). Overhangs from the top and side faces merge in stage E, creating the pocket. Afterwards, water molecules in the pocket surface move about making a more round, disk shape.

About being inexplicable by the standard theory of snow-crystal growth, this standard theory does not include the wandering of the mobile surface molecules over the edge. Now, if the new theory applied only to this corner-pocket formation, then it would be of little importance. But the wandering process cannot apply to only this situation (how would the molecules know when to start or stop?): It must ALWAYS be happening. And, as I mentioned earlier, I realized that the wandering process may help explain many other curious snow-crystal features that I had previously found inexplicable. In other words, it may be a fairly important discovery.

-- JN

The evanescent snow crystal

appears out of nowhere

The lines and boundaries

on its faces record a story

a story of a crystal's birth

a story of a crystal's life

But before the record vanishes

Who will hear its story?

 

 

A few years back, a correspondent of mine, Professor Akira Yamashita of Japan, long retired, sends me an email. In the email, he had a document with words and pictures of some small crystals that he'd captured back in the 70s. They were small crystals, essentially freshly "hatched eggs" from the frozen droplets upon from they had started. But some had small pockets of air near their corners.

To those who have studied any sort of crystal growth and have some familiarity with crystal-growth theory, these corner air pockets, or "bubbles", were in impossible locations. They should not be there. Pockets will form near face centers, not corners. But Prof. Yamashita also had a theory about their formation. His theory first looked sketchy to me, but I appreciate hearing about new ideas, so over the following years kept revisiting his theory, getting to think that it had merit, and wondering if it had other applications.

Then, just this past year, in our own ice-crystal experiments, we did something that apparently had never been done to small ice crystals in the lab before. We slowly grew a crystal in air. And we cycled it from slightly growing, to slightly sublimating (i.e., shrinking in size), to slightly growing again. A cycle that must happen in some regions of cloud. And here is what we saw:

 

 

 

Corner pockets!

 

After the sublimating, the subsequent growth kept a permanent record of the sublimation cycle in the form of 12 corner pockets, one pocket for each of the 12 corners of the crystal. These are pockets of air, just like the six large 'petal-shaped' pockets of air you see nearer the center of the crystal. They are forever stuck in the crystal. Stuck there until the crystal, with all of its features, vanishes back to air.

 

 

 

After seeing this, we ran a few more experiments, and each time we slowly grew, then sublimated, then grew again, we got corner pockets. The name 'corner pockets' refers to their location when they are formed; namely at the corners, next to the crystal perimeter. However, they remain essentially fixed in position as the crystal grows, and this means that as the crystal perimeter expands outward, the corner pockets will appear further within the crystal. Analogously, the 'center pockets' shown above formed at the face centers, on the crystal perimeter, back when the crystal was much smaller.

 

 

As to the theory of their formation, and how the theory can explain other observable features of snow crystals, you'll have to wait for a subsequent post.

 

 

- Jon