Mr. V. J. Schaefer,Footnote 2 a member of the Committee on Snow of the American Geophysical Union, has devised a simple and rapid method of “fixing” snowflakes. These are treated with a resin—polyvinyl formal—dissolved in ethylene dichloride, which deposits a coating estimated at 8/100,000 of an inch thick, through which the melted ice escapes. A shell is left showing in detail the original form of the flake which can be examined at leisure.
The process should be most useful for the correlation of the different types of crystals in changing weather systems, since, for this purpose, a large number of crystals must be collected in a short time. This is one of the tasks it is hoped the Society’s Snow Survey will undertake later on. Mr. Schaefer intends using this method for a snow survey he is carrying out in the State of New York. He has sent us a number of papers describing its use for this and for other purposes, such as the examination of metal crystals, in which certain advantages over other methods are claimed for it.
