Polar vortex got you down? Arctic outflows and wind chills wearing away at your patience and have you cursing this brutal winter season? Well, this video from Vyacheslav Ivanov might help you see that snow isn’t so bad … when there’s only one flake … and you’re looking at it under a microscope … in a lab … rather than sitting on your driveway, sidewalks and roadways with a few billion of its closest friends.

Although it’s very likely true that no two snowflakes are alike (we can’t know for sure unless we actually look at them all, which would be impossible), their formation isn’t entirely random. If it was, there’d be all different kinds of shapes… triangles, rectangles, squares, circles and all their three-dimensional versions as well. There are a lot of different kinds of snowflakes, but one overall ‘theme’ behind them is that they all have a six-sided symmetry. That is, they form hexagons.

This is due to the shape of the water molecules that go into making them, and how they all ‘fit together’ once the water starts to freeze and the molecules try to form up into the orderly shapes of a solid.

There’s a great video you can watch about this, called The Science of Snowflakes, from Joe Hanson of It’s Okay To Be Smart.

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