November 20, 2010 – Kenneth Libbrecht receives the 2010 Lennart Nilsson Award.  Including a cash prize of 100,000 kronor, the award "is the world's most prestigious distinction in scientific and medical photography" and is presented each year in Stockholm in honor of Lennart Nilsson, the legendary Swedish photographer. According to the board's citation, "Kenneth Libbrecht's images open our eyes to the regularity and beauty of nature. With his photographs of snowflakes, he turns mathematics, physics, and chemistry into images of great beauty."

For more information, see The Lennart Nilsson Award

January, 2010 – The Secret Life of a Snowflake takes a close look at snowflakes.  Aimed at a juvenile audience, this book explains where snowflakes come from, why they are symmetrical with six sides, and other basic aspects of snow, weather and snowflakes. 

For more information, see Snowflake Books.

March 1, 2009 – CBS News Sunday Morning airs a 6-minute piece featuring KGL's snowflake science.  CBS local news in Los Angeles aired an accompanying story the following day.  Click here to view.

March, 2008 – Researchers use the mathematics of cellular automata to produce the world’s first realistic computer-generated snowflakes.  David Griffeath (Univ. Wisconsin) and Janko Gravner (UC Davis) solved the equations governing faceted crystal growth using cellular automata to produce numerical models of snowflakes that look just like the real thing.  Previous models of dendritic growth could not reproduce the development of strongly faceted crystals like snowflakes. This breakthrough in numerical modeling gives researchers an important new tool for studying the detailed molecular dynamics of crystal growth.

For more on computer-generated snowflakes using cellular automata, see David Griffeath's web page here.
 

October, 2007 – The Art of the Snowflake provides remarkable new views of the microscopic beauty of snowflakes.  The book, published by Voyageur Press and featuring snowflake photography by Kenneth Libbrecht,  is the first substantial compilation of snowflake photographs in over half a century, since Ukihiro Nakaya’s Snow Crystals in 1950 and Wilson Bentley’s Snow Crystals in 1931. The book presents numerous large-format, high-resolution, color photographs that reveal snow crystal structure in unprecedented detail.

For more information, see Snowflake Books.

February 8, 2007 – Kenneth Libbrecht makes an appearance on The Martha Stewart Show, talking about snowflakes, snowflake photography, and his recent book, Ken Libbrecht’s Field Guide to Snowflakes.  Click here to view.

October 5, 2006 – The United States Postal Service unveils a set of four first-class postage stamps featuring snowflake photographs by Kenneth Libbrecht. Over three billion stamps are printed and are quickly sold out for holiday mailing.

October, 2006 – Ken Libbrecht’s Field Guide to Snowflakes becomes the world’s first field guide describing the many different types of snow crystals. Readers are encouraged to venture outside with magnifiers in hand to observe for themselves the many remarkable forms of falling snow.

For more information, see Snowflake Books.

April, 2005 – The Physics of Snow Crystals is published in the Reports on Progress in Physics*. The article by Kenneth Libbrecht is the first comprehensive review of snowflake science in over 20 years.

*K. G. Libbrecht, Rep. Prog. Phys. 68 855-895 (2005). View pdf file (2.6 Mbytes)
  

January 10, 2004 – CBS Evening News airs a 2.5-minute piece featuring KGL's snowflake science.  Click here to view.

October, 2003 – The Snowflake: Winter’s Secret Beauty becomes the first popular-science book about snowflakes. The book, written by Kenneth Libbrecht with photographs by Patricia Rasmussen, tells the story of snowflakes -- what they are, how they grow, and why they appear in so many spectacular, symmetrical forms.  It is the most significant book on the subject since Ukihiro Nakaya’s Snow Crystals (1950), which described his scientific investigations and photographs of snowflakes, and Wilson Bentley’s Snow Crystals (1931), which displayed many of his snowflake photographs. The Snowflake wins a National Outdoor Book Award in 2004.

For more information, see Snowflake Books.

March, 2002 – Researchers discover a technique for growing slender ice needles suitable for growing isolated artificial snowflakes.  Researchers at Caltech describe how to use electrically and chemically modified crystal growth to produce ice needles oriented along the crystalline c-axis. The fast-growing ice needles can be extremely thin, with tips as small as 100 nanometers in diameter. The authors also developed a theory that describes the needle growth under various conditions.

For more information, see Designer Snowflakes III and Electric Growth. The research paper describing this work can be downloaded here* (More research papers are available here.)

*"Electrically Enhanced Free Dendrite Growth in Polar and Non-polar Systems," K. G. Libbrecht, T. Crosby, and M. Swanson, J. Cryst. Growth 240, 241 (2002).
 

December, 2001 – Kenneth Libbrecht and Patricia Rasmussen extend the state-of-the-art of snowflake photography by producing super-high-resolution color images of snowflakes. The images were acquired using a specially designed microscope with novel color lighting techniques as well as advanced photomicroscopy hardware.

For more about techniques, see Photographing Snow.  For more snowflake pictures, see my Photo Galleries.
 

April 7, 2001 – ABC World News Tonight airs a 2.5-minute piece featuring KGL’s snowflake science.  Click here to view.

February, 1999 – The world’s first snowflake website is launched.   The site was created by Kenneth Libbrecht and hosted by Caltech with the URL www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/ (later to become SnowCrystals.com). The site is devoted to “snowflakes, snow crystals, and other ice phenomena” and includes many high-resolution color photographs.  The website soon becomes a popular resource for people interested in snowflakes.
 

July, 1998 – Kenneth Libbrecht and Victoria Tanusheva describe a new theory for growing thin ice needles using high voltages. The growth of “electric needles” of ice was first discovered in 1963 by Basil Mason and collaborations in London, and the phenomenon remained unexplained for 35 years. The new theory builds upon solvability theory developed in the 1980s, adding the effects of electrically enhanced diffusion on crystal growth.

For more information, see Designer Snowflakes III and Electric Growth. The research paper describing this work can be downloaded here* (More research papers are available here.)

*Electrically Induced Morphological Instabilities in Free Dendrite Growth," K. G. Libbrecht and V. M. Tanusheva, Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 176 (1998).
 

August, 1997 – Kenneth Libbrecht and Victoria Tanusheva produce the first movies of individual snowflakes growing on the ends of thin ice needles. The ice needles were produced using high electric fields following a technique discovered by Basil Mason and collaborators in 1963. By changing the growth conditions with time, Libbrecht and Tanusheva are able to control the shape of the growing crystals, thus producing “designer” snowflakes.

For more information, see Snowflake Movies.