The Sound of Snow: On the Necessity of Uniting Art, Nature, and Science in the Classroom
By Donna Marie Miller, July 22, 2011
Many people believe that snow is silent, and so did I for most of my life. This was because I had never really listened. This winter when I was out for a walk in the quiet countryside, I realized that falling snow does have a sound. This snow fall was a soft one, with big, fluffy, slow falling flakes, and when I paused to listen I heard the sound of snow. It made a soft tinkle, like ice chimes, or like feathers falling on dried leaves. It was like the sound of hail, but much softer, and like the sound of ice breaking up in the spring, but much fainter. Snow tinkles as it falls like faint, soft,crystal chimes.
During winter in the Northeast, snow is the single constant. It invades our thoughts, our conversations, and our dreams. It lies thick outside, a backdrop to all the windows, which are white on white. The black of trees, the red of birds, or the green of needles peep in between four foot layers of white. Snow blankets everything and everyone and flattens most of us in our efforts to come and go, or do simple tasks like getting groceries, going to church, or depositing checks. Even taking out the trash is difficult and unnecessary drives are often cancelled. Constant snowstorms envelope the mind in a somnambulant state, reduces activity, causes exhausted storm beaten naps, frustrated rages against nature, and enormous appetites. Carbohydrates, meats and candy seem to evaporate in direct proportion to the negatives in the temperature; so do plans for outings, lost in sudden whiteouts, and luxuries are put off in the need to pay large utility bills.
Children in the schools in Jamestown, NY, the teachers complain, rarely go out to play in the snow anymore. They stay inside and watch TV or play video games. In school, they are not allowed out unless the weather is fine. Snow play is disappearing. According to Richard Louv, who wrote “Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder”, nature play is disappearing year round, and not just in the Snow Belt.
This wasn’t always so. People like W.A. Bentley, who invented modern day snow science, spent time outside watching, drawing, and finally learning to photography the mystery of the snow flake. Isaac Newton built up a refined theory of light and color theory by means of simple nature observation, and we all know the story about the falling apple leading to the invention of the gravitational formula. In this paper, I use snow science as an analogy to all scientific inquiry, and show how nature and art has played such an important role in snow science that it is impossible to separate the three. Just so, science in the classroom must be wedded to nature play and art, or much of our children’s desire and drive to invent is at risk of being lost.
The falling snow suspends life somehow. When I was a child, I had a wonderful miracle happen to me concerning snow, one that was big enough to affect a lot of people, a whole region, in fact.
The first part of the miracle was that, at age eleven, I was overwhelmed with a longing for snow for Christmas. This longing must be considered unusual, because I was a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, where snow is very uncommon. I had only seen snow once before in my life, when I was four years old. That winter, it had snowed just enough so that my father, by rolling up the snow in about four neighbor’s yards, was able to build me a snowman. It was a rather dingy snowman by Yankee standards, covered with bits of grass and dirt, a few sticks sticking out of it, but I thought it wonderful.
The only other snow I had ever seen was in pictures in children’s books or on Christmas cards. I can remember looking wistfully at one of such pictures and wondering what it would be like to live in a place where there was so much snow that it would cover the trees and rooftops with a thick layer of white all winter long. This seemed exotic and lovely to me. I decided that, more than anything else, I wanted snow for Christmas. I even wrote a song for this; a prayer song, that went like this: “Oh Jesus let it snow on Christmas day. Oh, Jesus, let it snow on Christmas day. We’ll thank you so much, Jesus, if it snows on Christmas day. Oh Mary and Joseph, oh, Mary and Joseph, please ask the Holy Trinity for snow on Christmas day. “
There were two other verses, each addressing a different member of the Holy Trinity. I taught this snow song to my two best friends and to our younger siblings, and all of us, every night for two weeks before Christmas, lit candles at night and sang for snow. There were eight of us in all, from myself, eleven, to my youngest brother, Monty, then in diapers.
Christmas day came but there was no snow. I was disappointing, but how could I be for long with so many presents under the tree? Still, I wished for snow, but we stopped singing the song. Five days later, on New Year’s morning, it snowed, four whole inches, a miracle for New Orleans, Louisiana. This snow is still known in the area as the New Year’s snow, but no one knew how eight little children prayed for it, and how our prayers were answered, no one except for us, and those we told about it. “We did it, we did it,” I shouted with my friends as we ran to catch the flakes and make snowballs for the first time in our lives.
Ever since then, snow to me always seems like a miracle. I lived in the Snow Belt, where snow is more often cursed than prayed for. Let me tell you a little of what I have learned about snow.
There are seven principle types of snow crystals; plates, stellar crystals, columns, needles, spatial dendrites, capped columns, and irregular forms. Five of these types, the star, the plate, the column, capped column and the scroll or cup, have a structural arrangement in relation to their central axis, with 60 degrees between each point, and form at a plane of 90 degrees from the axis. In common language, this means that these types have hexagonal symmetry, are flat, and tend to have six points. This relates to the way that hydrogen and oxygen molecules bond together, forming what is called the crystal lattice.
There are other types of snow crystals as well; the needle, irregular needle, sectors, dendrites, and spatial dendrites. The basic types have many sub categories: snow can form into bullet shapes, capped bullets, stars that have sectored plates as arms, and on and on. Each crystal type forms at a certain temperature and according to the super saturation in the clouds where they originate. The crystal shape which we most associate with snow, that is the stellar crystal, can have six points, twelve, or even twenty-four. When the stellar crystal forms more than six points, upon microscopic observation, it becomes evident that a tiny column attaches the crystals, which appear to be just one star, but in fact are several joined together by very short columns, hence, they can appear in such multiples of six. In these cases the angles between the crystals are irregular, not the perfect divisions of 60 degrees that one might expect.
Rarely are the arms of stellar crystals perfectly symmetrical. The points can have the fineness of lace or filigree, or they can take the form of broad sectors or plates. Also, crystals can be rimed, that is, can pass through clouds that allow tiny droplets of water to freeze on them, forming a thicker rimed crystal. This riming can be so great as to obscure the original shape of the crystals structure.
Snow crystals start as minute ice particles that form around nuclei in the atmosphere. The nuclei may be dust particles with favorable molecular structures, or even minute crystals of sea salt. A single crystal is any single ice particle which has a common orientation in the orderly array of molecules which make up its solid structure. Some snow is so fine that it appears to be glitter in the air; these are very tiny plates which are called diamond dust. Diamond dust is evident on very cold, usually sub zero, sunny days. The hydrogen atoms in water provide the bonds, which hold together the structure called the crystal lattice. This lattice generates solid forms with hexagonal (six sided) symmetry in one plane. This is how all snow crystals are formed.
The phrase “no two snow crystals are alike” may or may not be true, but it certainly seems that way when one spends any amount of time examining snow crystals, whether with the naked eye, or with a microscope. A few people have been so enamored of the beauty and variety of snow crystals that they have spent whole lifetimes studying, drawing and photographing them. One such person was a farmer named William Bentley, who was the first to microphotograph snow crystals, and classified them from this close, systematic observation. Another person, a scientist named Nakaya, developed a chart for classifying snow crystals, and a chart which shows under what temperatures and moisture conditions each type is formed. The word snowflake is often misused to mean snow crystal; actually a snow flake can be one, but is often many crystals hooked together by their arms.
Here is what scholarly articles say about nature, art and science working together. “If science seemed determined to make the difficult and mysterious questions progressively more simple and explicable, I’m not sure that the reverse isn’t also the case….The same is true for a much humbler question, which is why snow falls in flakes that look like tiny, six pointed stars.” Mr. Ball in his article, The Joy of Six, went on to write about how the Chinese poets rhapsodized over the falling “six-petalled flowers”. On another page Ball describes Rene Descartes sketched snowflakes, discovering also the hexagonal symmetry, as he was out watching the “storm cloud,…which produced only little roses or wheels with six rounded semicircular teeth,”. These quotes are taken from The Joy of Six: the growth and form of snow crystals which also gives drawings by astronomer Giovanni Cassini done in 1692.
Another scholarly article, The Snowflake Man, by Martin Kemp describes the “unlikely hero”, Wilson Bentley, “a Vermont farmer with no orthodox scientific credentials”. His fascination with snow began young, as a child, and at the age of 20 (college age) he used a “specially constructed rig of bellows camera and microscope and took the first photograph of a single snow crystal.” His book, published in 1931, Snow Crystals, has become a nature classic. It contains 2,500 photographs of crystals, carefully cut and arranged to exhibit shape and symmetry, and is a masterpiece both of scientific and artistic work.
Japanese nuclear scientist Ukichiro Nakaya was, according to physicist Yoshinori Furukawa, in his article, Snow and Ice Crystals, “captivated” by the beauty and the symmetry revealed in Bentley’s book, and in 1932, proceeded to make his own observations and photographs. He lived in a snowy island in Northern Japan, and succeeded in classifying snow crystals still further, into 40 categories. He also showed how temperature and humidity affect the shape of snow crystals and created a chart which diagrams this easily for snow and physics students.
From these examples, we can infer that direct observation, even immersion, in the beauty of snow, and the careful recording in artistic forms like drawings and art photography were necessarily intertwined with all important scientific discoveries about snow. If this is true for our farmers and our scientists, how much more so for children who are just understanding the importance of science in their world, or who wish, perhaps, when they are full grown, to contribute something to the many branches of science and technology. We cannot assume that it is less important for them than for those who have already successfully made contributions, and the younger that children comprehend this connection, the more likely they will be to successfully make contributions, too.
While I was up North, I often reflected on the many feet of accumulated snow in the yards. I could hike and ski out on the frozen lake, and look at the ice castle in Mayville built with blocks of ice cut from the frozen lake. As I lay in the snow, amid a field of diamond sparkles, I’d think about all the poor people that I left down South who will never get to lie in three feet of snow, gazing a pure winter blue sky, and breathing air that glitters like diamonds. Neighbors and friends made me promise not to sing that snow song in the spring time, but I often did anyway. The sound of snow is an analogy for all that children and adults, for that matter, miss when they try to separate science and technology from nature and art.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ball, Philip, (2004). The joy of six: the growth and form of snow crystals. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Vol. 29, No. 4, 353-355.
Furukawa, Yoshinori, Wettlaufer, John S., (Dec. 2007). Snow and ice crystals. Physics Today, Vol. 60, Issue 12, 2.
Kemp, Martin, (2006). Snowflake man. Nature, Vol. 444, 21, 1008.
Louv, Richard, (2008). Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.