How Big Was the Largest Snowflake Ever Recorded?
The ones you made out of paper in kindergarten were probably smaller!
Fort Keogh, located in Montana, USA, has a very cool claim to fame.
Once a United States Army post, it’s now home to mostly antelopes and herds of cattle. Over a century ago, however, the world’s largest snowflake fell there.
As reported by Guinness World Records, a ranch owner named Matt Coleman spotted a huge snowflake in Fort Keogh on January 28th, 1887.
According to the cattle rancher, the snowflake measured a shocking fifteen inches (38 cm) wide, and eight inches (16 cm) deep!
In an interview with Monthly Weather Review Magazine, Coleman described the snowflake as being “larger than milk pans.”
Unless you’re familiar with antique kitchenware, this simile might be lost on you: a milk pan was a type of pan used to separate cream from fresh milk, and they usually measured two to four inches deep and sixteen inches across.
A snowflake that big? Wow!
What did it look like?
While there is no photographic evidence of the snowflake that Matt Coleman saw, it probably wasn’t a gigantic version of the dainty symmetrical shape we see adorning shop windows or hanging from Christmas trees.
According to Sandra Yuter at NC State’s Department of Marine, Earth and Atmosphere Sciences, the shapes of most snowflakes are a lot more chaotic than the decorations we make with scissors and folded paper.
Because snowflakes are formed at varying levels of moisture and temperature and then fall at different speeds, a variety of ice crystal shapes will often lump together with frozen water droplets.
These types of snowflakes are called aggregate snowflakes. Instead of pristine geometric shapes, these flakes usually look more like “fuzzy snowballs” than anything else.
How could a snowflake get so big?
Because these snowflakes form by combining many different ice crystals and frozen droplets, there’s no known limit on how big an aggregate snowflake could become while airborne.
The conditions have to be just right for large flakes to form, however. Wind turbulence will usually break up larger aggregate snowflakes into smaller clusters of flakes before they reach the ground, says Yuter.
This means that the record-setting snowflake in Fort Keogh (if the cattle rancher is a man of his word) would have needed to fall on a day when there was very little or no wind, plus a lot of moisture in the air to support the formation of lots of ice crystals and frozen droplets as the snowflake fell.
They say that no two snowflakes are exactly alike. A fifteen inch snowflake is definitely unique! Do you believe a snowflake could get that big?
