by Breezycycle

Created on: November 22, 2009   Last Updated: January 16, 2012

Imagine making observations of the natural world around you and having it  lead to a scientific discovery. That's the way it was for "Snowflake Bentley." Wilson A. Bentley lived in a small town in Vermont around the year 1880. Mr. Bentley studied and photographed types of snowflakes for over forty years. He did this on his own and the townspeople weren't entirely sure about Mr. Bentley and his intense interest in snowflakes. They liked to call him "Snowflake Bentley."

Wilson Bentley was very curious about snowflakes. He looked at them under a microscope and he took many pictures of the many different patterns of snowflakes. He took thousands and thousands of pictures of snowflakes. Then when he looked at his pictures and the structure of the snowflakes, he classified them, and sorted them out into more than eighty general types!

Mr. Bentley continued his study of snowflakes and their characteristics. For a while, people thought Wilson Bentley was just an eccentric man with an unusual hobby. Then, weather scientists, called meteorologists, finally started paying attention to Mr. Bentley's recorded observations of snowflakes. His studies sparked their interest in snowflakes and these scientists then made observations and measurements of their own. A whole world of snowflake study opened up for these scientists.

Of course, scientists knew quite a bit about snow and other forms of precipitation, but Wilson Bentley's own observations led these scientists to discover that the type of snowflake that forms is based on the altitude, temperature, and conditions of a cloud where the snowflake is forms.

Snowflakes with six- sided capped columns form in the highest clouds, where temperatures are the coldest. In the slightly warmer middle cloud layers, conditions are right to make column -shaped flakes as well as 6- sided , flat snowflakes. In still warmer conditions, In the lowest clouds, the warmer temperatures produce snowflakes that look like the column and 6 sided flat snowflakes as well as snowflakes in the shapes of stars and other different shapes.

The next time you look at how closely at the beauty of an individual snowflake, remember how Mr. Wilson A. Bentley, AKA "Snowflake Bentley" made these observations  right in his own yard. Remember, too,  that it was  his classification of snowflakes by shape that caught the curiosity and imagination of scientists studying weather.  Bentley's studies  led to many more scientific discoveries about how snowflakes actually develop into such fascinating patterns.

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