In praise of nature's spinning, spiraling patterns
Jon McCormack's new book celebrates the whorls, hexagons, and half-moons that appear in the world all around us.
One chilly autumn morning, during a camping trip in the Pacific Northwest, I went for a walk along the beach. Drifts of fog obscured much of the scenery, so I began to inspect the sand around my feet, hoping to encounter an interesting rock or shell. Soon, I was mesmerized not by any individual object, but rather by a tapestry of curious patterns that unfurled across the beach in every direction. I encountered clusters of small, round depressions reminiscent of lunar craters and patches of lingering seafoam with an almost honeycombed structure. I noticed narrow, meandering trails carved into the sand and clumps of squiggling, udon-like tunnels bulging from below. The ridges and troughs on some parts of the beach resembled desert dunes in miniature. Other sections were feathered, rippled, or scaled with chevrons, parabolas, or half-moons. In a couple places, something had inscribed perfect concentric circles around a lone plant.
After the trip, I couldn’t stop thinking about the patterns I had seen— these complex, beautiful, clearly non-random forms. What explained their existence? How had they come to be? I began to investigate. The ebb and flow of crashing waves, I learned, creates V-shaped patterns called rhomboid ripple marks. If a lapping wave encounters a pebble or other object, it scours the sand around it, forming more distinct crescents. Grains of sand, blown by the wind, leap from the beach and crash back into it, flinging yet more grains in to the air. Over time, the repeated vaulting and settling of particles exaggerates naturally occurring ridges and depressions, producing dune-like corrugations. Some animals, such as snails, form trails on the surface of the sand as they search for food, whereas burrowing mollusks make webs of sinuous, slightly raised tunnels. And when the wind flattens and twists the stems of well-rooted plants, it can trace arcs and circles on the beach as though wielding a compass. The beach was a text written in a secret language by wind, wave, current, and creature—a language that could be deciphered. Every pattern I’d seen was a rune, mysterious yet full of meaning.
The seashore is also where Jon McCormack developed a new appreciation for nature’s patterns and their hidden meanings. A renowned photographer, conservationist, and vice president of camera and photo software at Apple, McCormack and his wife moved to California during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, seeking solace and shelter. Every evening, he visited Asilomar State Beach, camera in tow, where he was drawn to nature’s “quiet harmonies,” as he calls them. “The thing that really struck me as fascinating were these little moments in time where you have a combination of tide, light, and rock that creates these transient patterns,” he says. “That was far more interesting than the rest of the grandeur of the beach. I’ve always been very interested in the environment. This moved me to be a photographer primarily interested in the pattern and structure of the natural world.”
Looking through his archives, he discovered that nature’s patterns had guided his compositions for years, even if he hadn’t fully realized it. Now, he wanted to photograph them deliberately and explore the parallels between them. Sometimes that meant visiting a neighbor’s backyard to examine the petals of a hibiscus in bloom or learning how to photograph miniscule, jewel-like plankton through a microscope. Other times he ventured as far as the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard to capture the ethereal beauty of ice caves. The result is a new book, Patterns: Art of the Natural World, which showcases intriguing forms at every scale, from microorganisms to mountain ranges. Punctuating the gallery of gorgeous images are several short meditative essays by esteemed thinkers and writers, including biologist David George Haskell, and National Geographic Explorers Wade Davis and Sylvia Earle.
Nature’s patterns have captivated our species for far longer than we have written records, as evidenced by prehistoric cave paintings and hand axes ornamented with seashells. Philosophers and scientists have contemplated them for millennia. For much of human history, patterns such as lightning bolts, the phases of the moon, and the bewitching spots and stripes of animals were explained through folklore or just-so stories. At this point in time, scientists have made considerable progress in explaining these phenomena, though plenty of mystery remains. Again and again, researchers have found that there is a secret logic behind nature’s most astonishing and complex patterns.
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Consider the snowflake, one of the most beloved icons of symmetry in nature. The ensorcelling beauty of a snowflake begins to take shape at the atomic level. Every molecule in existence is made of individual atoms that fit together at specific angles. This geometry determines the shape those molecules make when they bind together into larger structures. When airborne molecules of water freeze, the angles between their atoms result in hexagonal ice crystals. Thus, all snowflakes begin as simple floating hexagons.
As those six-sided crystals fall through the air, they grow larger by accumulating and freezing more molecules of water. The protruding points of the crystal have greater access to vapor in the air, so those points tend to grow faster, often resulting in thin extensions, which can repeatedly branch, forming much more complex shapes. Microvariations in humidity and temperature determine the particular growth trajectories of these branches and a snowflake’s final form. This process is so variable that it’s extremely unlikely for any two snowflakes to be identical. Yet every snowflake obeys the same physical laws, emerges from the same set of atmospheric processes, and exhibits the same radial symmetry.
The hexagon is one of the most ubiquitous patterns in nature. We find it in bee hives, insect eyes, tortoise shells, pineapple skin, crystal gems, columns of basalt, and rafts of soap bubbles floating on water. Hexagons are an extremely efficient way to fill a space. Only three even-sided shapes can fill a flat plane without leaving any gaps: squares, triangles, and hexagons. Of the three, hexagons are closest to circles—they enclose the largest area with the smallest perimeter—and thus require the least material for the greatest coverage. The angles at which hexagons meet also provide excellent structural stability.
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Similar explanations are likely behind the prevalence of fractals and spirals in everything from leaves and seashells to hurricanes and galaxies. Rivers and lightning bolts branch in fractal ways as both seek the most efficient way forward—the path of least resistance. Because fractals excel at spreading throughout a given space without filling it completely, they are especially useful as branching networks that efficiently transport air or fluids within a living body. Likewise, spirals seem to help organisms maximize efficiency. The intersecting spirals in sunflower heads, for example, are thought to allow for the most efficient packing of florets and seeds. In this way—in their striking orderliness and reciprocity— patterns are expressions of nature’s intrinsic poetry.
“I wanted people to see what I see in nature,” McCormack says of his new book. “I wanted to put the wonder I see in front of other people and I wanted to do that in a way that was accessible. I didn’t want it to be a fancy art book, textbook, or treatise. This book is my visual poem to our planet.”
