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."

Intelligent life in Oklahoma...

[MosesJones]

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

Re:Intelligent life in Oklahoma...

[cybrpnk2]

...can evelve faster by checking out our earlier version of this story over on Sci-Fi Today [scifitoday.com] (and even leaving a comment or hello there!) and also by signing up for SFT headlines on their Slashdot home pages here [slashdot.org].

Intelligent life in anywhere else?

[B2K3]

Okie Stereotypes [216.239.39.100] "Yes, I'm from the Sooner State, I tell them -- land of wheat fields, Indian reservations, TV evangelists, and country music; and who could forget the setting of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma: 'O-o-o-oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain.'

A state shaped like a kitchen utensil, as if the founders who drew the boundary lines had consigned it to serve as a perpetual building block of the Southwest, an essential part of the meal that no one sees, all glamour and strengt

Re:Intelligent life in anywhere else?

[Joe the Lesser]

'You label me, I label you, and I dump the unforgiven.'-Metallica

slashdot does itself disservice

[andy666]

how can slashdot claim to want less trolling and flamebait and then mod that at 5 funny ?

Who needs dogs and cats...

[MeanE]

when you have sea salt and plankton.

Is it just plankton...

[Anonymous Coward]

... or plankton in the sky with diamonds?

Re:Is it just plankton...

[cap'n foolsy]

that sounds a bit too much like a twilight zone episode.

Re:Is NASA really relevant??

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe, but would you have gps ? weather satellites ? Hubble ? Vegetables in little bags, that taste fresh until 2099 ? ...

Re:Is NASA really relevant??

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect it is more about the ability to get ON the moon, than it is about actually getting there

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.

Re:Is NASA really relevant??

[duckpoopy]

Don't forget Tang and that delicious freeze-dried astronaut ice cream. The space race accelerated the development of these and many other novelty snacks.

Re:Is NASA really relevant??

[Jerf]

If you're willing to have an open mind, I'd check out stuff like [google.com] this [nasa.gov].

Most estimates I've seen have the space program paying for itself in the long-run, you just don't see it because the money doesn't show up as income on NASA's budget sheets.

Re:Is NASA really relevant??

[Pike65]

Yeah, even Slashdot appear to have realised we're losing interest since they're so desparate they seem to have made the Space icon 1x1 on the front page . . .

"Aiee! I just clicked on a Space story by accident!"
"Don't move, I'll get the disinfectant!"

Re:Is NASA really relevant??

[p00ya]

they seem to have made the Space icon 1x1 on the front page . . .

the icon is 73x59 for me..

Re:Is NASA really relevant??

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need a hurricane, neither NASA to
have stuff going in the sky,
I have seen a large stem of a plant flying at
2000m (6500ft).
It was taken there only with air convection.

Re:Is NASA really relevant??

[barakn]

And you got to 2000m by flapping your arms....

one word easily refutes your claim

[andy666]

TANG

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.

Yes - For all intensive purposes he's the best!

[andy666]

some klingons !

Thank god no horrible spongebob references.

[Crasoum]

Means I can be the first to get the crabby patty recipe

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 [google.com] gives 155 000 hits compared to 91 000 for moon halo [google.com], so halos around the moon are apperently not entirely uncommon. On this page [nasa.gov] 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 [nasa.gov]
http://www.geocities.com/~kcdreher/sundogs.html [geocities.com]

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

Re:Moon rainbows

[aaarrrgggh]

It isn't just cold weather; I've seen them in San Francisco and Thailand both. Don't know what the cause is...

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.

Re:Europa

[prmths]

Jupiter hasn't erupted into a brown dwarf yet; so it's ok. :D

Re:Europa

[kinnell]

Give it another 7 years ;-)

Re:life

[GigsVT]

The big deal is that it would cause all the religious people to freak out, and they would have to rewrite their religion in a major way. I'm not naive enough to believe it would be the end of religion, they've adapted before in the face of overwhelming evidence that they were wrong.

Re:life

[prmths]

religion does seem like it'd have a cow. After all there are people out there who still belive the earth is flat and we're riding through the universe on the back of a turtle.
Personally I couldnt care less about the religious people anymore.. I've lived in the bible belt for so long i'm immune to some of the residents' 'blind faith'. Blind faith has always bothered me to no end. Even when I was a naive kid of 5 or 6. I believed what my parents told me to believe; but i didnt like it. None of it made any sen

Re:life

[b-baggins]

That's OK. Some day you'll realize you aren't half as smart as you think you are, and don't have a tenth of the world figured out the way you think you do.

Well, that of course assumes your ego gets out of the way, so maybe I'm exercising a little too much blind faith here as well.

Re:life

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come on -- he isn't asserting that he's smarter than anyone else; he's simply saying that he questions things before blindly believing them. Big difference.

Try not to belittle others for not blindly believing something. Skepticism is a good thing.

Re:life

[master control progr]

This is not flamebait. Religions don't have a very good track record when it comes to accepting new discoveries that contradict them. Besides, this view is fairly common among those of us who choose to think for ourselves... FWIW, although I was raised in church, I started tuning out uber-religious people after a "good christian" woman called me a fairly nasty name over a debate about whether dinosaurs had really existed. Her view was since they were not mentioned explicitly in the Bible, they never exi

Re:life

[Zaak]

The big deal is that it would cause all the religious people to freak out, and they would have to rewrite their religion in a major way.

You're painting with an awfully big brush there. I don't know of many religions where "life only exists on earth" is a major doctrine.

I'm sure there are some people for whom it is a strongly held belief, but for each one of those there are many more who do not have a strong belief either way, and even quite a few for whom the discovery of life on other planets would be a

Re:life

[sketerpot]

Well, not all the religious people---but quite a few of them. There are some people who have certain religious beliefs but don't seem to really believe them. I don't know; I gave up trying to understand that years ago.

Re:life

[naasking]

Jupiter's natural radiation could heat Europa's innards enough for life to thrive.

I do not think it has anything to do with radiation from Jupiter (since any radiation would simply be reflection from the Sun), but instead the heat is caused by the intense gravitational tidal forces from Jupiter (similar to the tidal effect of the moon on Earth). Gravity is constantly compressing and altering the shape of Europa and this friction causes it to heat up to the point where liquid water can exist (under the sur

Jumping the Gun?

[tanveer1979]

I guess the guys being too hopeful. Even if it is micro-biological life, it needs some time to form out of basic building blocks.

Up in the clouds the conditions are too violent and volatile and material transfer is past, so life may land up there, but it is difficult for it to develop from there, unless the whole cloud is made of primodial soup, like the depths of jupiter where there is thich murky cloud where scientists think life is possible.

But life forming in clouds like venus has, sorry i dont bite.

Yet more exciting!

[sn0wcrash]

There have been reports of dogs, people and farm animals to name a few in the clouds during several tornados! This must say alot about the possibility of life on Jupiter!!!

Re:Yet more exciting!

[metlin]

It pains me to note that you've put people in the same category as dogs and farm animals :p

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!!!

in other news (FISH)

[oliverthered]

Plankton, pffft I want fish to rain down from the sky. [abc.net.au]

English as second language?

[cybermace5]

I always kind of thought the term was tell-tale.

I guess once the FAA gets word of this, they'll require algae impact testing on airliner windshields .

Star Control II was right...

[BondHeadGuy]

...about those Slylandro gas bags. Don't ask them about their glowy bits!

Re:not before my coffee

[SEWilco]

prismatic light halos around cirrus clouds pointed to ice crystals with nucleated hexagons and sea-salted clouds

right. run that by me again?

It's perfectly clear.
There was a rainbow-colored arrow pointing at ice crystals on honeycomb, with a side serving of salted mashed potatoes.

Maybe you should order from the kiddie menu. Want some fried immature avian reproductive cells on dehydrated ground grass seed paste?

They must be in heaven

[mnmn]

Hey this plankton came from cloud No 9, came with a tiny harp.

A good book...

[binner1]

If you find this concept interesting, and enjoy Sci-Fi, try the book Wheelers [amazon.com] by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. It's a neat book that fleshes out this concept in intricate detail. I picked it up in a clearance sale at my local book store, and was glad of the purchase!

-Ben

The Sun, The Genome and The Internet

[shancock]

by Freeman Dyson talks about this in his wonderful book published in 1999. Specifically he talks about the chances of finding lifeforms on Mars and Europa (a satellite of Jupiter). He suggests looking into the space around Europa instead of on the surface for "freeze dried fish".

From the final chapter: "Every time there is a major impact on Europa, a vast quantity of water will be splashed from the ocean into the space around Jupiter. The water will partly evaporate and partly condense into snow. Any creatures living in the water not too close to the impact (meteor impacts) will have a chance of being splashed intact into space with the water and quickly freeze dried."

I'm not sure if this book has been reviewed in slashdot, but it deserves another shot since so much here is relevant especially after the last shuttle disaster. Dyson is dead on track here.

Impact on other sciences ?

[Dave21212]

IAJAP, I am just a programmer, but

If this living material is present at that level, do we think it can precipitate out ? and if so, what impact do you think this would have on projects that analyse the minute traces of life in remote areas [sciencenews.org] ? Actually, what impact might that have on umbrella sales ??? ;)

Anything else in the clouds?

[nytes]

How long until we all get to move to the Smoke Ring?

Your an idiot

[foodpie79]

plankton that was picked up by a hurricane out of the water, died and didn't originate there is a hell of alot different than life that developes in the clouds. I would thinkl that someone who knows how to type and use a computer would be smart enough to realize this but hey, maybe I've overestimated the inteligence required to do those kinds of things.