Ten kilometers (more than 6 miles) into the atmosphere, a plethora of microbes is thriving, possibly affecting cloud chemistry and playing a role in atmospheric conditions, according to new research published today (January 28) inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Previous research on snow and rainwater collected at high elevations had already established that bacteria in the air initiate moisture condensation that leads to precipitation. Some of these microbes secrete special proteins that allow them to initiate ice crystallization, which may affect weather by changing the temperature at which ice crystals form in the sky. But most microbe-rich precipitation was collected from the Earth, and may represent different bacterial communities than those in the atmosphere, which may have different properties for ice nucleation and cloud formation than those found in rain water, explained senior author Konstantinos Konstantinidis, a microbial genomicist at Georgia Tech. Read More
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