 A snowflake is a delicate little thing, but put billions of them together with a little wind and pretty quick they cease to be delicate little things. Just imagine how big a pile of snow would be created here if all the snow that fell in the 50 miles upwind from here all was deposited here in this roadbed. Well, the fact is a blowing snowflake has a very short lifetime. Research indicates that a blowing snowflake seldom makes it more than 3,000 yards. The farther that a snowflake blows, the smaller it gets. That's because, well, here's the new word for today, it is sublimating. Sublimation is a word which describes the phenomena where a solid skips a liquid phase and moves straight into a gas, never melting into a liquid. In other words, ice turns to water vapor in the sublimation process. This process accounts for the disappearance of about 80% of blowing snow. So the water that was in the snowflake turns into vapor and is carried on downwind to make a cloud over Illinois, rather than to wind up in a roadbed behind a snowdrift or in your driveway. From the University of Wyoming Cooperative Extension Service, I'm Eric Peterson.