Plankton in the Clouds

An anonymous reader writes "NASA is reporting that the September 1997 Pacific hurricane, Nora, was able to deliver sea salt and plankton as far inland as Oklahoma. The tale-tell signs of prismatic light halos around cirrus clouds pointed to ice crystals with nucleated hexagons and sea-salted clouds. Various proposals have been made previously about such 'life in the clouds' proposals on other planets like Jupiter and Venus."

Comments

Re:Moon rainbows

[trikberg]

It was probably a halo. I've never seen one around the moon, but they do occasionally appear around the sun if it's cold enough. I guess the conditions in Finland are a little different from Houston.

Google for sun halo gives 155 000 hits compared to 91 000 for moon halo, so halos around the moon are apperently not entirely uncommon. On this page is a neat picture of a sun halo, and a short explanation of the phenomenon.

Re:Moon rainbows

[CraigoFL]

No idea what saltwater would do, but in Western Canada (where I'm originally from) we could see these things all the time (both around the sun and the moon) when the weather got cold enough. They're commonly called "sundogs"; the technical term is "parhelia".

Some links:

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answer s/970207e.html
http://www.geocities.com/~kcdreher/sundogs.html

They may be pretty, but they'd be easier to appreciate if they didn't signify that it's freakin' cold outside :-/

Re:Is NASA really relevant??

[orac2]

Have we learnt ANYTHING about the moon, which we couldn't have done, sitting here?

Absolutely. Here's one shining example -- the so-called genesis rock, a piece of anorthosite which formed part of the moon's priomordial crust, was a critical piece in unlocking the moon's early history.

It was recoverd by the crew of Apollo 15, the first of the J-missions, where the objectives focused on science and not just seeing if the Apollo hardware worked (e.g. landing on 11, precision landing on 12).

This crew had been trained as pretty good field geologists by the legendary Lee Silver. Without their eye for geological context this rock would probably never have been spotted, and certainly not had it's recovery site as well characterised.
Even geologists who had been previously opposed to the manned missions to the moon acknowledged the value of their contribution, and those of Apollo 16 and 17.

To quote geologist Dale Jackson, who said at the time: "Did you see those guys today? They got up there on the side of that mountain and found that bolder and they sampled the soil around the rock, and then they knocked a piece off it, and then they rolled it over and got some of the soil underneath it! Why, they did everything but fuck that rock!"

If you think this material could have been recovered by, say, remotely controlled machine, well, I invite you to place the best robot and robot team you can find in the Arizona desert and match them up against a single geology grad student and search for, say, fossils, for a day.