Flaking Away

As unique as fingerprints under a microscope, snowflakes all melt in the same way. Usually they evaporate – their icy prongs sublimating to vapour in the surrounding air. Here, physicists simulate how their icy spikes crumple (bottom row), forming rounded crystals as water vapour diffuses away (from the blue to orange areas here). This virtual thaw matches perfectly with how more complex snow crystals are whittled away (top), and the mathematical model could help climate scientists to extrapolate up from single flakes to vanishing glaciers. But that’s not all. The way ice crystals disintegrate has parallels in pharmacology, where similar simulations may help to design drug molecules which dissolve quickly inside the human body, speeding up the effect of treatments.

Written by John Ankers

John Ankers

Writer

A former researcher in systems biology, John is now an online biology tutor and professional coach supporting the wellbeing of scientists and NHS professionals. He's writing, too, of course.

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• Image from work by Etienne Jambon-Puillet, Noushine Shahidzadeh & Daniel Bonn
• Institute of Physics, Van der Waals-Zeeman Institute, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, October 2018