Episode • 3/5 of the Little Christmas Boats podcast

Before the snowflake escapes, things happen in the cloud: “Snowflakes are created in clouds and in clouds, they don’t just move down, they can go up and down. It’s like an incredible washing machine in the atmosphere. Eventually, after a while, the flakes become too large and are more attracted to the ground than carried away in the whirlwind in the cloud. And so they end up going down.“

The speed of a snowflake’s fall is very variable, the scientist confirms: “It can vary a lot from one flake to another, but what we can say in general is that a flake always falls much slower than a drop of water or a drop of hail“.

A machine to calculate the speed of snowflakes

This is not a “Christmas fish”, but a real invention that we owe to American scientists: “There have been measurements taken for a long time, more or less with the naked eye. Then there are people who have built machines based on snapshots and images, and they generally find that the speed of the chips, in most cases, is about one meter per second.“