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

Intelligent life in Oklahoma...

[MosesJones]

Is now only a few billion years of evolution away... :-)

Dead or alive?

[Anonymous Coward]

Scientists were surprised to find what appeared to be frozen plankton in some cirrus crystals collected by research aircraft over Oklahoma, far from the Pacific Ocean.

So they found some dead plankton. I'd be much more impressed about the connection with Venus if they were still alive while in the clouds some how.

Moon rainbows

[ojQj]

A few years ago, in Houston I saw a pale rainbow around the almost-full moon at night. It was a very cold night for Houston (below freezing), but since it was Houston, the humidity in the air was very high. Someone explained to me that the rainbow was because the humidity in the air was frozen into ice crystals which then had special refractory properties.

Based on this article, I have to ask: Could saltwater have been a better explanation for this beautiful phenomenon? Does anybody here know?

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 :-/

life

[prmths]

life as we know it is possible anywhere there is water. At this point, simple life forms like algea and bacteria on an extra-terrestrial world wouldn't excite me more than a "that's damn cool" type reaction. I'm to the point now that I'd expect there to be simple life on some of the other worlds in our solar system. I'd be a lot more surprised of all the planets and moons around us were completely dead. Now if they found concrete proof of extinct complex organisms on mars, or a sea full of life on Europa, It'd be a very exciting day. Jupiter's natural radiation could heat Europa's innards enough for life to thrive. Some say that the amount of radiation from jupiter would kill everything off; but life has a tendency to find a way to overcome obstacles. After all, despite all our efforts, spammers exist, trolls keep posting and the Saddams of the world keep on having their way.

That sounds like a horrible Beatles song

[Rhinobird]

Plankton in the sky with algea?

I seem to remember someone finding spiders and vaious bacteria way up before, and as soon as they brought them back down to eath they came back alive. Curse my bad memory.

OOOOOklahoma!

[Joe the Lesser]

Where the plankton comes sweeping down the plains!!!

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.