Imagine stepping outside on a cold winter day.

The air feels crisp, your breath turns into little clouds, and tiny white flakes drift down from the sky.

You hold out your mitten and a snowflake lands softly on it.

Before it melts, you see something amazing, a tiny, sparkling shape that looks like a little star.

Snow might seem simple, but there is a lot of science behind it.

Snowflakes are tiny wonders, and learning how they form is like discovering a secret world in the sky.

Snow begins high up in the clouds. Clouds may look like cotton, but they are actually made up of millions of

tiny water droplets. When the air in the cloud is very cold, below freezing, these droplets begin

to cool down even more. Some of them freeze into tiny ice crystals. These ice crystals are

the very beginning of a snowflake. These crystals form around something very small in the air, such as a tiny speck of dust or pollen.

This dust acts like a seed that the ice can grow on.

Without dust in the air, snowflakes wouldn't form as easily.

It's funny to think that something as beautiful as a snowflake starts with something as ordinary as dust.

As the ice crystal gets colder, it begins to grow tiny arms, making the shape we often recognize.

Snowflakes usually have six sides or six points because of the way water molecules arrange themselves when they freeze.

The molecules lock together in a shape that repeats over and over again like a pattern.

That's why snowflakes look like little six-pointed stars.

But here's where things get even more interesting.

No two snowflakes look exactly the same. Why? Because each snowflake takes a different

journey through the cloud. Some fall through very cold air, some fall through slightly warmer air,

and some spin around or bump into other crystals. These tiny changes in temperature and air

movement cause each snowflake to grow in a unique way.

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