The world’s largest snowflake ever recorded

DB Wong
2 min readMar 11, 2023

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In January of 1887, at the city of Fort Keogh, Montana, in the United States of America, the biggest snowflake ever recorded fell there. According to the Guinness World Records, the snowflake in question was 15 inches across and 8 inches thick, making it the biggest snowflake that has ever been documented. At that time period, a ranch owner called Warren A. Judson, who was also a member of the United States Army Signal Service, was the one who noticed and measured the snowflake.

The size of the snowflake is quite astonishing when one considers that the diameter of the majority of snowflakes is generally no more than a few millimetres. During the process through which water vapour in the atmosphere condenses into ice crystals, snowflakes are created. The precise form and proportions of a snowflake are determined by a number of different parameters, such as the temperature, the humidity, and the wind speed. Each snowflake is one-of-a-kind, both in terms of its appearance and the way it is constructed, and no two snowflakes are ever precisely the same.

Despite the fact that it occurred more than a century ago, the record for the biggest snowflake ever recorded has not been surpassed to this day. Yet, over the years, there have been more claims of very huge snowflakes, with some reaching up to 12 inches in diameter. Nevertheless, these stories have not yet been officially validated as breaking the world record for their respective categories.

In general, the world’s biggest snowflake ever recorded is an amazing natural phenomena that serves as a tribute to the splendour and variety that can be found in the natural world. Snowflakes are an essential part of the water cycle on Earth and play a key part in the functioning of many ecosystems all over the planet, despite their little size and seemingly inconsequential nature.

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