Libbrecht, Kenneth; Wing, Rachel / The snowflake
Author Libbrecht, Kenneth
Wing, Rachel
Title The snowflake
Subtitle winter's frozen artistry
Publish Date 2015
Publisher Voyageur Press
ISBN 9780760348475
Type Nonfiction (Paper)
LC Call # QC926.32.L53 2015
Subject Snowflakes--Pictorial works
Snow
Synopsis From ten thousand feet above the Earth, a snowflake begins its fall. Its journey starts when ice forms around a nucleus of dust and is blown by the winds through clouds where the crystals blossom into tiny ice stars. Because it weights next to nothing, a snow crystal may take hours to fall--finally landing where Kenneth Libbrecht can use microphotography to record the tiny, intricate, frozen artistry of the snowflake.
The snowflake is a fleeting, mysterious work of nature's art that has long fascinated humans. French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes wrote the earliest description of snow crystals in 1637. The first images of snowflakes required the invention of the microscope in the mid-seventeenth century, followed by the publication of the first images of snowflakes, drawings made from microscopic observations, in 1665. Later books by Frances Knowlton Chickering and Wilson Bentley exposed a wider audience to snowflakes.
But it wasn't until the publications of The Snowflake: Winter's Secret Beauty (2003) by Kenneth Libbrecht, with photography by Patricia Rasmussen, that a huge audience was exposed to the story of snowflakes and spectacular microphotography of seemingly etched snow cyrstals captured on slides. That revolutionary book, followed by the additional books by Kenneth Libbrecht, The Little Book of Snowflakes (2004) and Ken Libbrecht's Field Guide to Snowflakes (2006), defined the art of snowflakes for a generation. Now, The Snowflake: Winter's Frozen Artistry again touches the hand of Mother Nature, with all new microphotography and an entertaining mix of literature, art, and science, to bring a flurry of delightful snowflakes into the hands of warm-blooded humans everywhere.