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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.
I scream!
You scream!
We all scream for ice-- SPLAT!
If you post it, they will read.
"But geologist Roger Buick of the University of Washington in Seattle told the same publication ..."
Somehow I think that the guy from Colorado should back off, seeing as someone from Washington would be much more familiar with rain.
got standards? --- http://www.w3.org/
I was swirling it above Spain trying to look down Xui Xuis top.
Sincerely,
--Galacticus
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
The ice in Spain falls mainly on your windshield.
Anybody contacted Taco Bell yet?
Hey hey, put that chunk of ice away *ducks*
A quick look on mathsci.net shows other papers that they have published:
"Lake Superior: Gosh it sure is a lot of water," Journal of Hydrologic modeling.
Jesus [...] has spent the last two and a half years investigating so-called megacryometeors
Cut the guy some slack, you think it's easy being the son of God?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Don't they get sick of using the same template? To wit:
"An article over at [some news site] has an article about [some subject]. Pretty interesting read. They talk about [cut n paste something from article]. Either way, [say something stupidly obvious]."
Sorry. It's monday.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I'm not a religious man, but you ever get nailed by a 30kg block of ice falling from a clear sky, you can be pretty sure God was trying to tell you something.
The article talks about hail, but they fail to
mention that hail ONLY comes from thunderstorms.
Just like tornadoes ONLY come from thunderstorms.
And almost all lighting comes from, you guessed it,
thunderstorms. They also fail to talk about the
freezing level. That's how a thunderstorm becomes
a thunderstorm. A cumulus cloud that's growing
upwards because of vorticity (air rising fast)
grows past the freezing level. The top of the
cloud and the bottom of the cloud get different
charges and blammo, you have a big floating battery in the
sky. The hail forms because there are rapidly
moving columns of air moving up and down
in the cloud and water trapped in that column
gets frozen, recoated with water, frozen again,
etc.
The ice clouds he's talking about are
cirrus clouds of some kind. That's basically
any cloud made up of super tiny ice crystals
because they are above the freezing level.
a VERY VERY rare type of cloud is called
cirrocumulus. This is ice crystal clouds in
the shape of the puffy white clouds called
cumulus that sometimes turn into thunderstorms.
The reason these clouds are so rare is because
they are unbelievably heavy. It takes an
incredible amount of 'vorticity' to keep
them up there, and they don't last long.
If you ever see very high puffy cottonball
looking clouds, there's a great chance you'll
have a thunderstorm soon (24-48 hours) because
vorticity (air rising fast) is one of the major
things needed. There is NO WAY upper atmosphere
vorticity is going to hold water in the air
long enough for it to weigh 10 friggin pounds.
There is no way that ice clouds would clump
together and form ice. There is simply no force
there to do that work. You might get a ball of
something more like snow, but definitely not
ice. I'd be more willing to bet some smartass
with a catapult is having fun at the ice factory.
If they said this was related to thunderstorm
activity, I might buy it. But on a clear day?
No way.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
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
Just get everyone to run dual proccie Itanium2's. The things will melt before they get within a 1000ft of any suitably equipped home.
There was a run of just that sort of thing in the 1970s.
The chemical toilets on airplanes are emptied by connecting a big hose to a fitting on the bottom of the airplane, opening its valve, and pumping the contents out. The valve has a rubber seal, and the toilets occasionally collect small metal objects -- jewelry, coins, keyrings, OJ's knife and so forth -- which can damage the seal on the way out.
So once in a while the seal springs a leak, and since the airplane is pressurized in flight by as much as 8 pounds per square inch, a lot of the water can leak out. At jet cruising altitudes it immediately freezes, and a ball of ice collects on the outside of the airplane. Then when it lets down into warmer air, the ice gets dislodged and, well, bombs away.
After three or four of these incidents over a couple of years, the industry worked out some design changes and inspection requirements that seem to have pretty well stopped it. But if one hits your property, you should immediately note the time and location, put the biggest chunk in a baggie, and stick it in your freezer for proof. You can count on a rather nice settlement from the airline, especially if keeping it quiet is part of the deal.
rj
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"?
I see lots of people asking basic questions such as "What about...?" and "What if...?" and "How come...?" Come on people, get past the popsci article and go straight to the source from the guy himself.
Da Blog
"And huge hailstones, about one hundred pounds each, came down from heaven upon men; and men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail, because its plague was extremely severe." Revelation 16:21
i will be outside holding up a large bucket of cointreau
:wq
From his website:
Martinez-Frias has also published around 130 articles in scientific and technical publications (mainly specialised in Earth Sciences -- Geology, Economic Geology, Mineralium Deposita, Computer and Geoscience, Neues Jahrbuch fur Mineralogy, Geotimes, GeoMarine Letters, Episodes, Geological Magazine, Applied Geochemistry, Journal of Chromatography, AMBIO, Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, Meteoritics and Planetary Science, etc.), in high profile multidisciplinary publications (Nature), high prestige international books (Springer-Verlag, Geological Society) in popular magazines, (Mundo Cientifico, Fronteras de la Ciencia y la Tecnología) and in the Scientific supplements of national newspapers (ie El Pais, El Mundo, ABC).
Martinez-Frias is the author of the book "Sulfuros y Sulfosales de Metales Nobles" and co-editor of several books, among which are; "Recursos Minerales de España" (CSIC 1478p) (Spanish Mineral Resources), "Geologia y Metalogenia en Ambientes Oceanicos. Depósitos Hidrotermales Submarinos (Geology and Metallogeny of Seafloor Hydrothermal Deposits) (IEO, 162p) and "Esto es Imposible" (Aguilar, 320p).
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
MicroVax.
Ice blocks keep falling on my head ...
And that prob'ly means concussion soon will make me dead
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!
It seems that every news article about weather events these days mentions a possible connection to climate change! Has it occurred to anyone that since there is a lot of money for climate change research, scientists, in response to the inevitable reporter question, will of course say it *might* have something to do with climate change.
It is time for a new fear. Climate change is getting trite!
The only good weather is bad weather.
"Martinez-Frias said only around a fifth of the ice meteors are ever found."
Ermm... how do they count what they haven't seen?
"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."
Logic dictates that if global warming causes one level to get colder while another gets warmer, that global cooling would cause one level to get warmer while another gets colder. Am I repeating myself? And besides, this is a suggestion, not a formulated hypothesis based on evidence. At least not yet.
Scientific fact is that water vapor and carbon dioxide are the most abundant greenhouse gas. As our combustible-fuel appliances become more efficient, there are less hydrocarbon emissions and more H20 and C02 emitted; the net effect on greenhouse gases is the same. Besides, it has been argued that a single volcanic eruption has a far greater effect (neg or pos, you decide) on the atmosphere than the entire history of mankind burning stuff.
One more thing: there's no such thing az a ZEV (Zero-Emission-Vehicle). Electric is displaced emissions -- unless your power is hydro (and "we all know how bad that is for the fishies"). The manufacture of solar cells and batteries/fuel cells require the use -- and disposal -- of tons of toxic chemicals. Nuke also involves toxic waste (nevermind it's the cleanest and safest form of electricity, it's gotten a bad rap by the actions of irresponsible people).
To say that man (woman too!!) is causing global warming is a crock. If we all went back to eating wooly mammoth cooked over teradactyl dung, I don't think we'd notice any difference in the rate of global climate change.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.