Snow. Frozen water. Intricate hexagonal structures, each an individual. It has it's beauty, it has it's hazards. Before we get too much further along, let me issue a warning. If you are one those people who love to catch snowflakes on your tongue, you might not want to read any further. There. You have been warned.

We think we know about things, and then we learn more. And it kind of turns your world on it's side. 32 degrees. The temperature when water turns to frozen. Ice. Snow. Snizzle. What ever you call it, it freezes. Right? Wrong. It turns out that water actually doesn't freeze at 32 degrees. It actually freezes at much lower temps. But why then do we think and see water freezing at 32 degrees??? To delve deeper requires a bit of science. Pure water is H2O. We don't have much pure water in our world. The closest you will probably find is highly filtered water like the bottles of Evian. Because it is pure (or close enough for our purposes) it doesn't freeze at 32 degrees. Go ahead and stick a bottle of it in your freezer, I'll wait. Okay. Presuming you did that, you now have a bottle of really cold water, that is not frozen. If you now open it and add a contaminant, like a speck of dirt, bacteria, etc, it will instantly freeze solid.

I won't go into the scientific principles, but now you know that what makes water freeze at 32 degrees is not the water, but the contaminants in it. But Ann, what kind of contaminants are in the air that would cause snow to form, and why would nature do this whole process?

Every breathe you take you inhale all kinds of things besides oxygen. Living things. Like bacteria. But the human body is remarkably resilient. It processes all kinds of things and just passes them through. The air has lots of bacteria in it. All kinds. Some we are familiar with, as they can cause colds and other illnesses. Other kinds have no effect on us. But they all are very tiny and light. So light that they cannot float down to the earths surface. So how do these lighter than air bacteria get to the ground, to the plants that they need for life, get down? They find themselves a friendly drop of water. And once they attach to the water, it becomes able to freeze at 32 degrees. It makes snow possible. Then it floats down, lands on plants, the ice causes damage to the plants surface creating an opening for the bacteria to get in, and the life cycle of the bacteria continues.

So now you know about how the bacteria lifecyle is part of the larger cycles of weather. So now that you know each snowflake has to contain a contaminate. Whether dust, bacteria, or something else, in every snowflake is something more. Will that stop you from catching them on your tongue the next time it gently falls from the sky? Maybe not. But I highly recommend not eating yellow snow. That is just another thing all together. So go for a walk and enjoy the beauty of the (nots-so-pure) white snow.