In the early 1900s, Wilson A. Bentley sent 500 prints of his snowflakes to the Smithsonian to ensure their safety for the future. The images are now part of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.

More moisture freezes onto this ice crystal as it falls toward ... He took over 5,300 photographs of snowflakes in his lifetime. Because of Mr. Bentley’s work, meteorologists found there are ...

a layer of square-shaped snowflakes called faceted crystals can form a weak layer. These snow crystals have strong angular edges that resemble squares or cups, and once stacked on each other ...

and it is generally not possible to explain why even simple crystals develop their characteristic shapes. A case in point is the snow crystal, which grows into a puzzling variety of unusual ...

Image caption, From a single ice crystal, these amazing patterns form according to different weather conditions. Snowflakes are ... scientist Wilson Bentley devised a clever way of attaching ...