 |
||
| · join · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post new topic · | ||
Posted on 09/27/2002 9:06:27 AM PDT by narby
MADRID (Reuters) - A Spanish scientist says global warming ( news - web sites) may be to blame for giant blocks of ice which fall from clear skies and rip gaping holes in cars and houses.
Jesus Martinez-Frias has spent the last two-and-a-half years investigating so-called megacryometeors -- ice meteors -- which tend to weigh more than 22 lb and have been known to leave five feet holes in houses.
He fears the formation of these hailstone-like blocks on clear days could be a worrying symptom of climate change.
"I'm not worried that a block of ice might fall on your head ... but that great blocks of ice are forming where they shouldn't exist," said Martinez-Frias, director of planetary geography at Spain's Astrobiology Center in Madrid.
"Components of the atmosphere, like ozone and water, are changing in different levels of the atmosphere...We think these signs could be evidence of climate change," he said in a telephone interview with Reuters.
While Martinez-Frias said he was far from certain as to why the ice meteors formed, he said they were neither hoaxes nor blocks of ice falling from the bars or bathrooms of passing aircraft, as skeptics have suggested.
"We're not talking about hoaxes," Martinez-Frias said. "It's very easy to tell real and false ice blocks apart."
"It's not water from airplane toilets...Its isotopic composition bears the signature...of Iberian rain."
SMASHING WINDSCREENS
Ice clouds made from crystallized vapor trails of aircraft are well known to pilots, but Martinez-Frias suggests that because global warming involves one level of the atmosphere getting colder while another gets hotter, some ice clouds now remain longer.
Their centers then fall through the atmosphere, bouncing and gathering mass, to end up smashing through a car windshield or, more usually, landing softly in a field, he suggested.
The first megacryometeor found this year in Spain -- by a startled farmer riding his tractor in Soria -- weighed 35.27 lb.
Three others were found later, bringing the world total over the last decade to more than 50. But Martinez-Frias said only around a fifth of the ice meteors are ever found.
An ice meteor weighing around 440 lb has been found in Brazil, Martinez-Frias said. Other blocks have been found in Mexico and Australia.
The blocks form between two-and-a-half and six miles above ground, he said.
Some scientists doubt whether hail can form on a clear day.
"Solid ice cannot form in the absence of thick, highly visible clouds," Charles Knight, a hail expert at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado was quoted as saying in a supplement of Science journal.
But geologist Roger Buick of the University of Washington in Seattle told the same publication that a model created by Martinez-Frias and his team showing ice can form on a clear day was an "important advance in that it thoroughly documents and provides an explanation for a spectacular phenomenon."
"Revelation 16
21 From the sky huge hailstones of about a hundred pounds each fell upon men. And they cursed God on account of the plague of hail, because the plague was so terrible."
I guess it's been going on for a while, eh?
Those are called 'pissbergs' ...
By Jove, I think he's got it...... "The rain-in-Spain falls mainly-in-the-pla - in!"
And not from the plane! Pesky megacryometeors!
What else do you need to know?
The RATS are in disarray...eradicate the rodents !!
Fire Democrats, Hire Republicans !!
GWB Is The Man !!
Snuff Saddam, NOW !!
Death To all Tyrant's !!
The Second Amendment...
America's Original Homeland Security !!
Freedom Is Worth Fighting For !!
Molon Labe !!
Excellent post, illustrative of the fact that the appelation "scientist" is often applied to individuals who are, in fact, blithering idiots.
There was once a time when an individual had to master material beyond the grasp of the moron, but today, with relativism polluting objective science in liberal institutions of "higher" learning, many so-called scientists, are in fact, politicized useful idiots.
Caveat emptor.
Small Comets and Our Origins
University of Iowa | circa 1999 | Louis A. Frank
Posted on 10/20/2004 2:13:25 AM EDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1250694/posts
|
||
| · join · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post new topic · | ||
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.