The Science of a Stellar Day

We know you love it, otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading this. You love it when it whispers around you, gathers on you and your mo. You love to taste it. You love to play in it. You love to live in it and the reason you come to Whitewater is that you love to carve, shred, rip, bomb it.

You could be forgiven for believing there is magic in it and that it’s sent from the heavens or from the stars. In a way it is, you see the best powder snow, where you sink to your knees while skiing, is made of snowflakes called stellar dendrites. Dendrite meaning ‘tree-like’ and stellar, is of course because they look like stars.

Stellar dendrites have six symmetrical main branches and a number of randomly placed side-branches. They can be large—up to 5mm in diameter.  Although they have intricate shapes, each stellar dendrite is a single crystal of ice, formed when an extremely cold water droplet freezes onto a pollen or dust particle in the sky. As the ice crystal falls to the ground, water vapour freezes onto the primary crystal, building new crystals, which become the six arms of the snowflake. Each arm is naturally symmetrical as the ordering of the water molecules is the same from one side of the crystal to the other.

The key to the formation of Stellar Dendrites is the temperature and humidity of the atmosphere. Typically the largest specimens with fernlike side-branches usually form in temps around -15º C. We are talking atmospheric temperatures here, way up in the clouds, it’s often much warmer by the time these extremely thin and light babies hit the ground and gather into a low-density snowpack often referred to as champagne powder.

I don’t know about you but next pow day I’m taking a moment while I ride the chair in between runs to observe these little wonders and marvel at how they came to be.

SOURCE: http://www.snowcrystals.com