It’s a Forecast of Snow for one Southern California Professor

By Mark Hoerrner

Kenneth G. Libbrecht is a nerd, but that’s a good thing. He’s the kind of nerd who sees phenomena in nature and wants to understand the science behind it. He’s an inventive individual who can fashion his own lab equipment. What started for him as part of his job as a professor of physics at California Technical Institute has turned into a fascinating hobby.

Libbrecht photographs snow. Not just snow, but individual snowflakes.

His work is an insight into incredibly complex components of nature. "I really got into that by the science," he said. "I started looking into research on snowflakes and how they were formed. I read lots of case studies but noticed that the pictures were horrible. So I created a camera linked with a microscope and started taking pictures."

Although only a hobby, the professor has integrated ice crystal development into his research at Cal Tech. According to Libbrecht, there’s a nucleus of water that starts absorbing water vapor, and soon, you have a snowflake. It’s usually a simply geometric shape like a hexagon or pentagon. From there, the points continue to pick up vapors and begin to spread out in what most people think of as the "points" of the snowflake.

"It’s interesting and baffling in some ways," he said. "I found the physics very interesting—sometimes they grow in a cylindrical column and sometimes in thin plates. Most people think that to be so symmetrical, one end has to be talking to another, but that’s not true. The arm, the overall design, really, of the snow crystal comes from the temperature and happens to all of the arms at the same time. The shape of an arm really tells the story of its history."

Libbrecht has authored several books on the subject and named each type of snowflake that he has found. He refers to the names as an outline. "You ask yourself, ‘what kind of snowflake is that?’ and some of them appear to have a very clear shape," he said. "As for them being alike, they are a complex shape. You could compare them to the diversity of fingerprints. The odds of finding two alike are nearly zero. The ones we actually create in the lab are nearly similar, but that’s because we have a controlled environment. Nature is not so simple."

Libbrecht says people were skeptical of his work at first. "Its funny for someone who lives in southern California to photograph snow," he said. "But once I started showing the pictures around, people really liked the work. It’s so unique and varied. That’s one of the reasons its so much fun to photograph snowflakes. Every time I go out, I find something new."

For more information on Libbrecht’s hobby, visit http://www.snowcrystals.com.