Snowflake Hunter Scours the Earth to Study Crystals

Jan. 12, 2006 — -- It was the middle of January, the temperature had dipped to 40 below, and a peculiar phenomenon known as ice fog was drifting across the desolate landscape near Fairbanks, Alaska. That's the kind of weather that makes sane men seek cover, but Kenneth Libbrecht was, well, feeling a little flaky.

"I loved it," he says, recalling one of dozens of trips that have taken him from his home in sunny Southern California to some of the coldest places on the planet.

That's because Libbrecht's passion is snowflakes. He is undoubtedly the world's foremost expert on the subject, and there's nothing frivolous in his effort to study and photograph the ice crystals that form snowflakes.

Libbrecht is a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, and the creator of one of the most popular Web sites on the Net, which draws about 2 million visitors a year. The site, SnowCrystals.com, is, of course, all about snowflakes.

"I got into it from the science end," Libbrecht says. His main field of interest is crystals, everything from diamonds to semiconductors, and how materials condense into solid structures. It's a booming field because crystals form the heart of many a gizmo these days, including the computer that was used to produce this story.

"I was looking at how crystals grow and thought snow crystals would be an interesting subject to dive in to," he says. Ice is abundant, easy to work with, and it has one terrific asset.

"It's very cheap," says Libbrecht.

"So I started reading about snowflakes, and it was one of those things where one assumes that everything is known about this, and I was surprised to discover that there are a lot of things that are not even remotely understood."

Snowflakes form differently, depending on the temperature. At minus 30 degrees, for example, snowflakes become columns of ice crystals, and at three to 10 degrees above zero, they take the shape of stars. Why should temperature be the determining factor?

"Nobody knows," Libbrecht says.