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Svartifoss waterfall, Iceland, 2024.
Nature's Patterns - the beauty in the details
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Lots of communities are dedicated to nature's big pictures, the breathtaking vistas and scenic landscapes. Those are all great, but I find the details of the natural world to be just as much of a draw.
From ripples in sand, to whorls in bark, this community celebrates the beauty in the little patterns and textures of nature.
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[Image description: a photo looking down the center of a frilly-leaf kale, the edges of the leaves zigzag wildly, with an almost fractal appearance, and the colors range from dark green on the older outer leaves, to light green on the inner younger ones.]
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Post main photo 'Spiral Shell' by Lani Elliott
Spirals are common in plants and in some animals, notably molluscs. For example, in the nautilus, a cephalopod mollusc, each chamber of its shell is an approximate copy of the next one, scaled by a constant factor and arranged in a logarithmic spiral.
'Ammonite fossil' by AWLsheep
'Curled up' by Laurie Wilson
Plant spirals can be seen in....the arrangement of leaves on a stem, and in the arrangement....of other parts as in composite flower heads and seed heads like the sunflower or fruit structures like the pineapple and snake fruit, as well as in the pattern of scales in pine cones, where multiple spirals run both clockwise and anticlockwise
'Spirals' by Thomas Ferullo
'Fibonacci Flower' by arbyreed
'DSC_6832 Macro Mondays - Spiral' by marski101
From the point of view of chemistry, a spiral can be generated by......proteins that manipulate the concentration of the plant hormone....to control the relative angle of buds around the stem.
From a biological perspective, arranging leaves as far apart as possible in any given space is favoured by natural selection as it maximises access to resources, especially sunlight for photosynthesis.
'Green Spiral' by André Meurer
From the point of view of physics, spirals are lowest-energy configurations which emerge spontaneously through self-organizing processes in dynamic systems.
'NASA Sees Typhoon Chan-Hom's Strongest Winds in Northern and Eastern Quadrants' by NASA Sees Typhoon Chan-Hom's Strongest Winds in Northern and Eastern Quadrants
'NGC1232 Subaru and ESO' by Roberto Colombari
Info from Wikipedia
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The frozen condensation on my liquid nitrogen tanks gets so wispy and delicate. It moves like hair blowing in the wind.
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Dendrites on Ice
Ice crack patterns on Derwent Reservoir, Derbyshire, England.
Saturday 4 March 2006, 11.00am.
A general view of the location is here:
I have called these dendrites on ice, but they are really dedrites in ice, as clear ice fills the pattern. I am sure they should have a formal name, but as of March 2008, I have yet to find any reference to one.
On this occasion there had been about 10 mm of snowfall the previous evening, that probably fell on top of thin ice that had probably formed a few days earlier. The overnight of 2-3rd March had been very cold for early March in this part of England, c -8C. The daytime of Friday the 3rd was mostly sunny, with temperatures rising near to just above freezing. Most of the reservoir was open water, except this small area on the relatively sheltered east side.
The original ice formation on the lake surface may have been encouraged by the earlier snowfall.
The centre of each dendrite may be formed by leaves or other debris encouraging melting of the ice during the day, but what about the rest of the dendritic pattern? Differential ice expansion on the freezing of floating slush is a possible explanation.
At very low temperatures sheet ice contracts, but this forms straight cracks.
Update 20070219. Perhaps these should be called macro negative dendrites in ice, in order to distinguish them from the much smaller water dentrites within ice and snowflake dendrites. For these small dendrites, see the article by Harry Badeshia at
Found on flickr
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