Hey, wow, I just read this wonderful do-it-yourself experiment. A lot of people liked my previous post on the myth that no two snowflakes are alike. Here’s a way to preserve a snowflake forever using superglue.
It turns out that the reason superglue bonds things so quickly is that it’s made of a bunch of monomers of cyanoacrylate, which then polymerize upon contact with water. Think of it as a bunch of little legos floating around in the superglue which suddenly link up with each other in the presence of water, making something rigid. That’s why superglue glues your fingers (which are moist) before you get it to glue your coffee cup handle back on. So, what other things are moist? Snowflakes, for one (though suddenly I start to think of all sorts of other uses too). The beautiful pictures of snowflakes that Wilson Bentley took back in 1931 were hard to take, in part, because the snowflakes melted. So this guy named Tryggvi Emilsson realized that superglue’s tendency to harden on contact with water would make it perfect for preserving snowflakes. Here’s how:
1 – Get some microscope slides, superglue (liquid, not gel), and a freezer, and a snowy day.
2 – Freeze the slides, coverslips, and superglue — you can just put them outside on a day that’s 20 degrees or colder. Catch snowflakes on the slide or pick up with tweezers. (Hint, dry snow days will work better than wet snow days for seeing individual snow crystals).
3 – Put a drop of superglue on the snowflake.
4 – Press down the coverslip, just like you would if you were doing biology. Don’t press too hard.
5 – Leave the slides in the freezer for a few weeks so the glue completely hardens.
You have a beautiful snowflake preserved. The book (below) has a picture of one that was preserved for 30 years!
This is from a preprint of a new book that looks like it will be pretty fun – Theo Gray’s Mad Science (Experiments you can do at home but probably shouldn’t). It’s not released yet, but you can pre-order it on Amazon. Another fun tidbit from the book was how to salt your popcorn using sodium (an explosive metal) and chlorine (a choking yellow gas). Fun for the whole family, complete with flaming drops of liquid sodium.
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Hey, that’s very cool. That book may sell very well to all the would-bes out there and those who love to squirrel around with this stuff. Nice blog, by the way!
WOW! I had NO idea you could do that with snowflakes, or even what the science-talk means fully, but it sounds like a really cool experiment to do with my kids! Assuming it ever snows again, that is…
This sounds like fun! Can you post the image of the preserved snowflake? (So we know what to expect)
The preprint of the book that gave me the information has a beautiful image of a preserved snowflake, but I can’t really reproduce it here without the author’s permission. However, it really looks very much like one of the images of snowflakes that Wilson Bentley took.
Thanks for the explanation of how superglue works! I had no idea. Cool blog.
Hey. LOVE the idea makes for a very whimsical gift! I have just moved to states and have never seen snow so im very willing to try this out – where could i get hold of a few cheap slides and covers? any ideas?
Here’s a microscope slide set from Arbor…
http://www.arborsci.com/detail.aspx?ID=1033Affiliate=3
I couldn’t find cover slips but I bet you can use two slides.
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