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22lb Ice Blocks From the Sky
cavedwler writes "An article http://www.msnbc.com/news/814100.asp?0dm=-23ET over on MSNBC has an interesting writeup about large ice blocks forming in the upper atmosphere on CLEAR days. Pretty interesting read." The article talks about how this could be a harbinger of massive climactic change. Either way, I'd prefer to not have one of these things smack into my house.
It has started:
as heavy as a talent [between fifty and sixty pounds],
of immense size, fell from the sky on the people;
and men blasphemed God for the plague of the hail,
so very great was [the torture] of that plague.
(Revelation 16:21)
Trust me; Fundamentalist sermons will be referring to this story for a long time to come.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
for me is not whether or not ice can form. Of course it can form. The question in my mind is what kind of wind can sustain such a large glob?
Traditional hailstones form in the updrafts of thunderstorms--the more forceful the updraft, the larger the hailstones. This begs the question of what kind of wind is keeping these things aloft and allowing them to form. The answer could be easily found in a wind tunnel. What you need to know is the terminal velocity of these ice "blocks". I assume they are not actually blocks. That would just be too wierd.
Perhaps, there is some kind of ice structure that forms and has a very low terminal velocity... ice parachutes with thick centers? Then, as it falls through the atmosphere whatever it is that reduces the terminal velocity melts, leaving the "payload".
Also, is there any correlation between these things and anything else (like contrails?). If there is, then maybe we could use doppler RADAR to look for clear-air updrafts, and a telescope to view these things as they form. Of course, maybe these things are highly localized--little tornados in the upper atmosphere... maybe they are smaller than the resolution of the RADAR.
At any rate, I just hope these things stay away from my head.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Stories about weird stuff falling from the sky have been with us for millennia. Charles Fort (1874-1932) devoted his life to collecting newspaper clippings of rains of fungi, formless masses of protoplasm, hatchets, masks, the ceremonial regalia of savages, and stones--with and without inscriptions. One of his accounts, The Book of the Damned is online here. (By "the damned," he means data that science refuses to accept).Written in an almost poetic, tart, prose style, it is very readable. He talks of rains of "Butter and beef and blood and a stone with strange inscriptions upon it." Most of his information was obtained from newspaper accounts.
I'm inclined to take a very skeptical view of any stories about weird stuff falling from the sky. Maybe it's true about the blocks of ice, and maybe Fort's falls of frogs and fishes were true, and maybe other accounts of worms, snails mussels, snakes, turtles, and even a whole calf are true.
But I'd want to see heavier evidence than an MSNBC story.
Anyway, Fort would have loved this one.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
> What all of that basically amounts to is...well...that dog don't hunt. The only realistic
> source of that kind of thing is water being dumped by airplanes at high enough altitudes so
> that it has time to freeze before reaching the surface. A chunk of ice that big should be easy to
> save long enough to be examined; they should give a few samples to NOAA, say, and let them inspect
> it.
Agreed. I'd like to see some hard evidence of this given our present knowledge of precipitation formation and cloud physics (which admittedly is pretty limited, but certainly precludes events of these kinds).
The problem I have with the airplane theory, however, is that the instant that the water is ejected from the plane it will break up into thousands upon thousands of tiny drops which will instantly freeze at that altitude. A large mass of water would not freeze instantly due to its large heat capacity, yet at the same time it will not remain together due to the various forces yanking it apart (esp. friction).
So in other words our "megacryometeor" would (for it to form in the 4-9km AGL range) have to grow from a infinitesimally small nucleus (since allegedly the composition of these things is similar to the composition of rain) to the size of at least a basketball before it strikes the earth. Keep in mind that it can't simply start out as a mass of water the size of a basketball (as mentioned earlier), and thus must grow slowly enough to have all the water freeze/vapor condense onto it without losing it all, and yet somehow stay up in the air without the support of a strong upward current of air to balance out its terminal velocity, which will be on the order of 50 m/s (110mph) by the time it is the size of a baseball, let alone a basketball or more. Note that these upward currents of this magnitude occur *only* in the presence of strong thunderstorms.
The only thing I can think of that might remotely be able to do something like this is a very strong jet stream placed favorably next to a mountain range. You could then possibly have very strong vertical winds (this is very favorable for cloud formation, however) up to and even exceeding 50 m/s, and under *just* the right conditions you could probably grow a chunk of ice from nothing other than vapor over a long period of time...however we're talking about growth rates on the order of days and even weeks in the absence of clouds for a chunk of ice of any reasonable size. Thus even this highly idealized setup is not realistic, as it would have to persist steady-state for weeks.
In short, there could be some really weird process out there we haven't the foggiest notion about that is causing this, but I'll believe it when I see it...