One could, for instance, regard a snowflake the size of a soccer ball falling from the sky as a miracle. This happened in the American town of Fort Keogh (Montana) in 1887. A ranch owner picked up the giant snowflake and measured it. The snow crystal was 38 cm in diameter and 20 cm thick. You can imagine what would happen if a blizzard of mighty icy lumps suddenly fell on a city!
We are used to holding in our imagination the image of a snowflake as a light, almost weightless bit of fluff. But in 1944, something unimaginable was happening with the weather in Moscow. Snowflakes up to 10 cm in diameter fell on the heads of Muscovites, instantly forming white mountains.
Why there are (almost) no thunderstorms in winter It turns out that snowflakes look identical and beautiful only as they fall, hovering a little in the air. In reality, the vast majority of them look like untidy lumps made up of many separate ice crystals and frozen water droplets. And, by the way, no two identical snowflakes exist in nature! Each one is unique in shape. This discovery was made by Kenneth Libbrecht, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology.
By the way: on the island of Hokkaido in Japan there is the world's only Snowflake Museum, which has gathered curious facts about their mysterious life.
