NASA Detects Mysterious Electric Blue Clouds Hovering Over Antarctica
The vast ring of electric-blue clouds circling Antartica
NASA's aim spacecraft has detected a strange electric blue cloud formation hovering over Antarctica which they say may be having an effect on the extreme weather the world has been experiencing.
The vast ring of electric-blue clouds circling Antartica is causing many to speculate that it could be related to strange phenomena like UFOs.
NASA scientists also recently discovered a mantle plume producing as much heat as Yellowstone supervolcano, below the West of Antarctica which could also be the reason for the strange clouds.
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The researchers discovered the massive 'hot rock' below Marie Byrd Land, an area which is located between the Ross Ice Shelf and the Ross Sea.
The heat from the plume is now so bad that it's creating vast lakes and rivers below the ice sheet.The melting of the ice previously thought to be global warming may be attributed solely to the huge mantle plume, and why it collapsed sp rapidly at the end of the last ice age 11,000 years ago.
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According to wattsupwiththat These are noctilucent clouds (NLCs), made of ice crystals frosting specks of “meteor smoke” in the mesosphere 83 km above the frozen continent. Here is an animation from the past week:
This is the season for southern noctilucent clouds. Every year around this time, summertime water vapor billows up into the high atmosphere over Antarctica, providing the moisture needed to form icy clouds at the edge of space. Sunlight shining through the high clouds produces an electric-blue glow, which AIM can observe from Earth orbit.
“The current season began on Nov. 19th,” says Cora Randall, a member of the AIM science team at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. “Compared to previous years of AIM data, this season seems to be fairly average, but of course one never knows what surprises lie ahead, particularly since the southern hemisphere seasons are so variable.”
The formation of strange clouds in the high atmosphere over remote Antarctica may seem to be of little practical interest–but that would be incorrect.
Researchers studying NLCs have discovered unexpected teleconnections between these clouds and weather patterns thousands of miles away. Two years ago, for instance, Randall and colleagues found that the winter air temperature in many northern US cities was well correlated with the frequency of noctilucent clouds over Antarctica. Understanding how these long-distance connections work could improve climate models and weather forecasting–all the more reason to study eerily beautiful NLCs.
