Hailstones Packed with Bacteria and Chemicals: Study

Storm clouds in the Earth's atmosphere are packed with microbial life, reports Live Science.

The presence of microbial life in storm clouds was revealed by researchers at the Aarhus University, Denmark, who analyzed 42 hailstones that were recovered after a storm over Ljubljana, Slovenia, in May 2009.

After sterilizing the external layer of the hailstones, they detected the presence of several species of bacteria that are mainly found in plants and around 3,000 different compounds that are easily found in soil. Whereas not many soil microbes or plant chemicals were spotted.

According to the French Tribune, some bacteria contained pink pigments, whereas some bacteria were ice-nucleators. They play the role of seeds for the ice crystals where they stick to clouds. On becoming large, it falls down as rain or snow.

"Those storm clouds are quite violent phenomena," said study co-author Tina Santl Temkiv, an environmental chemist at Aarhus University in Denmark. "They are sucking huge amounts of air from under the clouds, and that's how the bacteria probably got into the cloud."

The study highlights the impact of bacteria on weather conditions. The researchers suspect that the bacteria multiply in clouds and later also alter the conditions of clouds, reports Live Science.

"When we started the analyses, we were hoping to arrive at a merely descriptive characterization of the bacterial community in an unexplored habitat," study co-author Ulrich Gosewinkel Karlson was quoted as saying in The Epoch Times. "But what we found was indirect evidence for life processes in the atmosphere such as bacterial selection and growth."

The researchers assume that the bacteria in the storm clouds arrive from the air above the Earth and get carried away to the storm clouds through an upward current.

The details are published in the journal PLoS ONE.