Holiday snowflake depictions inaccurate

2009-12-24 15:22:41 (GMT) (WiredPRNews.com - Education, News)

Snowflake depictions in popular culture are reportedly inaccuate.

An expert has stated that depictions of snowflakes seen in popular culture are wrong.

U.S. (WiredPRNews.com) – Snowflakes on winter holiday greeting cards and other depictions in popular culture are wrong according to an expert. As reported by LiveScience.com, snowflakes are arranged in a six-sided shape, rather than the four, five, or eight sides typically shown in modern depictions of the frozen water molecules.

Thomas Koop of Bielefeld University in Germany, who reportedly spotted the inaccuracies which he provided commentary on in the Dec. 24 publication on Nature, is quoted in the report as stating of his findings, “The resulting hexagonal crystal lattice is the lowest energy form of water at cold ambient conditions… As the molecular building blocks arrange themselves into a hexagonal structure on the molecular scale, so do snow crystals exhibit this hexagonal symmetry also on the macroscopic scale.”

Koop is further quoted in the report as stating of inaccurate depictions of raindrops, “The shape of falling rain drops is depicted incorrectly in almost any (children’s) book that I know of… Most often, they are drawn in a teardrop-like shape, a kind of pinnacle at the top and round at the bottom. However, in reality cloud droplets are spherical because of water’s surface tension and falling rain drops are somewhat flattened at the bottom (depending on their fall speed), because of the resistance they feel as they fall through the air (similar to the drag that you feel in your face when you bike).”

WiredPRNews.com – The latest in Education News

Photo Credit: Wikipedia User Michael