I have been complaining a lot about the snow and cold this winter. Nobody seems to be listening, and we are being hit yet again on the East Coast by the same storm that flooded California.  So I continue to look for the silver lining, the hidden beauty in all of this.

A while back we discussed the work of Snowflake Bentley who pioneered the technique of photographing snowflakes.  And if ever there was a place that the hidden beauty of nature is revealed, it is in the six point symmetrical structures of snowflakes revealed in a microscope.  Today I came across the work of Vyacheslav Ivanov, who takes this a step further by capturing the formation of these glorious ice crystals in wonderful time lapse sequences.  BTW – I think that I could live without the musical underscoring.

Ivanov torments us by not revealing the secret of how these images were made.  He is true to the “magicians’ code of secrecy.”  Crystal growth tends to evolve from a tiny point, a seed crystal, acting as what is referred to as a nucleation center.  The crystal just builds up and maintains symmetry. So i am thinking frigidly cold supersaturated water vapor chamber and a pin with a tiny crystal of ice.  Another possibility is a cold sheet of glass. Or perhaps it is indeed magic!