In London, where I live, you can forget about a white Christmas. The best I can hope for is an unfortunate flurry of flakes. So this year, I’m on my own snowmaking mission. And not just any snow: for maximum festive impact, I want to make the world’s biggest snowflake.
It will be a challenge. There is a Guinness World Record 38 centimeters wide and 20 centimeters thick. This storm was recorded in Montana in January 1887, when rancher Matt Coleman reported seeing snowflakes “bigger than milk pails” during a heavy storm. True, some experts are skeptical. “If this was falling from the sky, they probably should have been wearing helmets,” says glaciologist Douglas Mair of the University of Liverpool, UK. However, Guinness World Records insists that contemporary sources support the record.
But hold on! There is an extra: the largest snow crystal measured 10 millimeters. “A snow crystal is a single ice crystal,” says Ken Libbrecht, who took the record-breaking picture in December 2003 in Ontario, Canada. The textbook picture of a Christmas snowflake is actually a perfect snowflake, he explains, whereas a snowflake is actually several crystals joined together. So maybe I could break a record by making the world’s largest snow crystal instead – how hard can that be? “You can grow some ice crystals from water vapor,” says Libbrecht, who makes “designer” snow crystals in his lab at the California Institute of Technology. “But if you want to make it look like a snowflake — I mean a real symmetrical snowflake — that’s a big deal.” Obviously I’m going to need some help…
