Well to be honest, I don’t really miss Winter… but if there’s anything I do like about winter, it’s the crazy shapes snowflakes and ice crystals sometimes take. Brenda Loewen managed to surprise this crazy pattern of ice crystal formation right outside her home.

She actually shot an entire timelapse video:

FROSTYLAPSE from Brenda Loewen on Vimeo.

“Each clip is 4-7 hours of realtime freezing, after melting off the overnight frost accumulation with a hair dryer. The colours are natural and vary with the sky conditions and time of day. The types of crystals and formation speed are temperature dependent, and seem most ‘active’ at -15C to -25C. Shot with a Nikon D7100. Video is composed from ~85k photos. Assembled with Lightroom, After Effects and Premiere Pro.”

Ice crystals exhibit atomic ordering on various length scales and include hexagonal columns, hexagonal plates, dendritic crystals, and diamond dust. The highly symmetric shapes are due to depositional growth, namely, direct deposition of water vapour onto the ice crystal.

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