Posted on 03/02/2008 10:59:29 PM PST by neverdem
The same bacteria that cause frost damage on plants can help clouds to produce rain and snow. Studies on freshly fallen snow suggest that ‘bio-precipitation’ might be much more common than was suspected.
Before a cloud can produce rain or snow, rain drops or ice particles must form. This requires the presence of aerosols: tiny particles that serve as the nuclei for condensation. Most such particles are of mineral origin, but airborne microbes — bacteria, fungi or tiny algae — can do the job just as well. Unlike mineral aerosols, living organisms can catalyse ice formation even at temperatures close to 0 ºC.
The effect of the biological ‘ice nucleators’ on precipitation has been a mystery, not least because no one has yet been able to detect them in clouds.
Cloud counters Now a team, led by Brent Christner, a microbiologist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, has managed to catalogue these rain-making microbes by looking at fresh snow collected at various mid- and high-latitude locations in North America, Europe and Antarctica.
They filtered the snow samples to remove particles, put those particles into containers of pure water, and slowly lowered the temperature, watching closely to see when the water froze. The higher the freezing temperature of any given sample, the greater the number of nuclei and the more likely they are to be biological in nature. To tease apart these two effects, the team treated the water samples with heat or chemicals to kill any bacteria inside, and again checked the freezing temperatures of the samples.
In this way they found between 4 and 120 ice nucleators per litre of melted snow. Some 69–100% of these particles were probably biological. The results are published in Science today1.
The researchers were surprised to find ‘rain-making’ bacteria in all samples...
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
Abstracts are linked at the story. That's one of the titles. Can't make this stuff up.
micro ping
btt
Wow they discovered Condensating water Molocules have stuff in them quick everyone break out the right guard and the shaving cream let’s have an aerosol party !
Wait that will be banned soon because of global warming cooling warming !
Hmmm looks like rain today better wear your slickers...
Forgive my ignorange but- does the “69-100%” mean that the biological agents are required to make rain?
If so, how does this stack up to observations of rain on other planets?
Mother was right, don’t eat snow!
If you think about it, there’s a good chance there’s freeze dried bacteria in space hanging around Earth’s approximate orbit.
With all the launches we’ve done, and meteors that come into the atmosphere and skip off like a rock on a pond, it would seem to me that the odds are very, very high that at least a few of those spores are just out there floating around.
Don’t know if they could survive the solar radiation but it’s an interesting idea anyways.
It isn't just the yellow stuff!
I can't wait to show this to my granddaughter.
About a month ago I had her grab a couple of snow samples she thought were 'clean' and melt them down.
We put the dirt under the microscope and she was amazed at how much there was, mineral and organic.
We shoulda had a grant...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.