Scribal Terror: Noctilucent clouds

A new NASA satellite has recorded the first detailed images from space of a mysterious type of cloud called “night-shining” or “noctilucent."

The clouds are on the move, brightening and creeping out of polar regions, and researchers don't know why.

"It is clear that these clouds are changing, a sign that a part of our atmosphere is changing and we do not understand how, why or what it means," said atmospheric scientists James Russell III of Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia. "These observations suggest a connection with global change in the lower atmosphere and could represent an early warning that our Earth environment is being changed."

The "Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere” (AIM) satellite first imaged the noctilucent clouds May 25. People on the ground began seeing them June 6 over Northern Europe.

The clouds form 50 miles above the Earth’s surface, in an upper layer of the atmosphere called the mesosphere. The puffs of water vapor and crystals appear during summer months above the Northern Hemisphere's pole as well the Southern Hemisphere’s pole in summer.

Here's what they look like from the ground:

Comments

There was one prescient 'researcher' who knew the dire foreboding of noctilucent clouds as far back as 1992:
"Noctilucent clouds have begun to appear more often because of a huge buildup of methane gas in the atmosphere."
...
"Shouldn't it startle us that we have now put these clouds in the evening sky which glisten with a spectral light? Or have our eyes adjusted so completely to the bright lights of civilization that we can't see these clouds for what they are - a physical manifestation of the violent collision between human civilization and the earth?"

Al Gore "Earth in the Balance"

That's right. WE put those clouds there. All hail the Goracle and his internets!!

Posted by: JWebb | June 29, 2007 at 01:39 PM