Endless variations ...

“I think it’s a little over-engineered,” Mr. Komarechka said of Dr. Myhrvold’s process.  Credit...Don Komarechka

Snowflakes, produced by the gazillions, are unique, always 6 sided, endless varied, based on temperature, humidity and cloud composition, captivate one and all, especially with people taking the time needed to capture these evanescent entities in astoundingly detailed photography as seen by the images in this article.

An intricate process starting from one simple entity ...

Water is a simple molecule consisting of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen. When temperatures drop below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, the molecules start sticking to one another — that is, they freeze.

A snowflake is born in a cloud when a water droplet freezes into a tiny ice crystal. The shape of the water molecules causes them to stack together in a hexagonal pattern. That is why the archetypical snowflake has six arms.

Then the crystal grows, absorbing water vapor from the air and other droplets nearby evaporate to replenish the vapor. “It takes maybe 100,000 water droplets evaporating to make one snow crystal,” Dr. Libbrecht said.

It gets better ...

But how the crystal grows depends on the temperature and the humidity. In the 1930s, a Japanese physicist, Ukichiro Nakaya, was the first to grow artificial snowflakes in his laboratory, and by varying the conditions, he was able to catalog which types form under most conditions.

When temperatures are just below freezing, the snowflakes are generally simple hexagon plates. At about 20 degrees Fahrenheit, the prevalent shape is hexagonal columns. It is between 15 degrees and -5 degrees Fahrenheit that the archetypically beautiful snowflakes usually form.

At these temperatures, the points of the hexagon grow into branches. The branches then spawn other branches and smaller hexagonal plates. Slight variations in the temperature and humidity affect the growing pattern, and the conditions are constantly changing as the snowflake falls toward the ground.

“Because it has this complicated path through the clouds, it gives a complicated shape,” Dr. Libbrecht said. “They’re all following different paths, and so each one looks a little different, depending on the path.”

“Ice Queen,” a snowflake photographed by Dr. Nathan Myhrvold in Yellowknife, Canada, in March 2020.Credit...Nathan Myhrvold/Modernist Cuisine Gallery, LLC

Have to add just one more. Read the NYTimes piece in its entirety to see the different approaches people take to capture one of nature's wonders in splendid images like these. 

A snowflake photographed by Dr. Libbrecht of the California Institute of Technology. Credit...Kenneth G. Libbrecht