The one in which I discuss the emotional implications of cloud dynamics

 

Special effects was kinda sketchy in 1939. They used 100% asbestos to recreate snow in this Wizard of Oz scene. This post speaks about how even now, 84 years later, precipitation is still dangerous.

This week I get to talk about one of my favourite things – clouds! So, no crisis, but definitely some cirrus!

Honestly, part of me wishes I didn’t understand the science behind cloud formation, and could just blissfully assume that clouds are made from magic. Alas, I do understand the science, and it’s still kind of magical, because it’s like physics and chemistry come together in the most perfect way, to create these awe-inspiring little puffs in the sky. In school, I was a pathological procrastinator, so I spent a lot of time staring at the sky. Every now and then, I’d get to witness the birth of a cloud, where out of nowhere on a clear, sunny day, a tiny wisp of cloud would start forming. And who hasn’t at some point in their life looked up and said ‘Hey, that cloud looks like a dog/dragon/donkey/David Beckham!’? Really, I could write endless poetry about clouds, but I won’t because that’s very much an early 1800’s thing. What I will do, is tell you about two instances where I’ve been let down by clouds.

Firstly, back in 2010, I was living in a cloud-dream-world, which was abruptly and unceremoniously brought crashing down by my Grade 10 Geography teacher. My whole life up until that point, I’d been drawing my clouds like this…

But no, Mrs O. comes in swinging with an impassioned speech about how clouds actually have flat bottoms, like this…

Now, if you’re just finding this out now, I apologise for ruining your idea of the perfect cloud. But there is actually science behind it. You see, most clouds in real life, do, in fact, have flat bottoms. And that’s because vater vapour needs to cool down to a certain temperature to condense into raindrops – it’s called dew-point temperature. And in most cases, that temperature occurs as a ‘line’ or boundary in the atmosphere, which we call condensation level. So as soon as water vapour crosses that threshold, it starts to condense, and that leads to the formation of clouds.

 Here we see the soul-crushing reality of a flat-bottomed cloud.

 

Now, here’s the second way in which cloud dynamics really bothered me this week. You see, in order to condense, water vapour needs something to condense onto. Usually, this is dust, or airborne salt particles, or pollution. But this week I came across an article in euronews.green which discussed a rather concerning discovery made by scientists in Japan. Instead of the usual condensation nuclei, it was found that water vapour is condensing onto microplastics. Microplastics are small particles of plastic less than 0.5mm in diameter, that can last for hundreds of years. This makes them an enduring monument to humanity’s presence on this planet, and a critical weapon in the arsenal of those trying to have the Anthropocene recognised as a new geological epoch.

We quite literally have plastic raining down on us. Of course, my over-active imagination immediately assumes that this means that the clouds are trying to kill us. Whilst it’s not quite as dramatic as that, it is really very problematic, because it means that microplastics have pretty much entered all of Earth’s systems. Microplastics are present in the soil, the rivers, and the oceans, all over the world. They’re even present in us, as researchers have found microplastics in human blood streams, hearts, lungs,  and brains. They’ve even been found in unborn babies.

Right… I feel a crisis coming on, so I think I’ll take a side-track here to distract myself. How on earth did they figure out there were micro-plastics in the clouds? Because here, once again, my over-active imagination kicks in and all I can picture is a pilot sticking a Ziploc out the window of the plane to catch the clouds. The reality is actually almost as fantastic, because this study made use of a cloud collector.  

The cloud collector and the only appropriate response to seeing it.

The cloud collectors are placed at the summit of Mount Oyama, and the summit and foot of Mount Fuji in Japan. The cloud collectors collect the cloud water, which is then passed through a membrane filter, which was later rinsed with ultrapure water, to collect the particles captured. Thereafter, a very extensive filtration process was carried out, which separated the microplastics from all the other, well… stuff floating around in the clouds. If you’d like to have a look at all the ways the researchers filtered out the microplastics, there’s a very attractive flow diagram on page 5 of this document. Once they’ve sorted the microplastics from the dust, pollution, organic matter etc, the scientists use spectroscopy to detect and identify the airborne microplastics. Spectroscopy is the study of the colours emitted by material when it interacts with light. So, these scientists could see how light broke up when it met each particle in their super-filtered samples, and determine which type of plastic that particle is, and how much it had degraded. In doing this, they found 9 different polymers and one type of rubber in their cloud samples. They also determined that most microplastic particles originated from the ocean.

Think for a minute about the implications of this. Not only are our oceans filling with microplastics that we can’t get rid of, they’re also making their way into our food and freshwater supplies, because they’re being precipitated down from clouds. So, are the clouds killing us, or are we inadvertently doing that ourselves, with our global obsession with plastic?

Who even invented plastic anyway? Look what you’ve done, Leo Baekeland… Shame.