Molecular structure of snow and ice

To the delight of children and some adults, the cold season keeps coming back and there is snow and ice. All of this is water, which, by the way, is the only element on earth that can exist in all three states of aggregation. It is liquid and becomes gaseous as vapor and solid as ice.

This is how water turns into ice

Water has the chemical formula H.₂O. It consists of very small building blocks, the atoms. Here two hydrogen atoms have combined with one oxygen atom to form a molecule.

• The atoms with one another and the molecules with one another are very mobile, practically jump from one to the other and keep forming new structures. As long as the molecular structure is so flexible, the water remains liquid.
• If the temperatures drop below 0 ° C, the mobility of the atoms and molecules decreases more and more and the molecular structure remains stable, becomes solid and it is ice.

The further build-up of molecules turns ice into snow

• When snow forms, everything takes place in the air. When the water cools down in the clouds and the finest droplets with so-called crystallization nuclei (e. B. Dust particles) combine and then freeze, forming ice crystals that are smaller than 0.1 mm.


Is snow always the same cold?

What could be nicer for children in winter than the snow with its snowmen, ...

• These crystals fall down due to their increasing weight. Due to pressure differences, existing water vapor freezes and the whole thing grows to more or less large snow crystals.

So snow only arises when ice forms from the water molecules and there is a possibility of bonding with a dust molecule, for example. This leads to a molecular structure of the most varied of shapes and ultimately to beautiful snow crystals.