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(photo Source: YouTube) Rain is a very common natural phenomenon in our daily life. Whenever people look up at raindrops falling in the sky, they more or less have a thought: if only candy, food or pearls and diamonds were falling from the sky!

In fact, there have been all kinds of strange rains all over the world. These unusual rains are not only found in myths and legends, but may be more common than you think.

The earliest record of animal rain in the history of animal rain dates back to the first century AD, when the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder Sr. recorded a torrential rain in which frogs and fish fell from the sky.

In 1794, French soldiers saw toads falling from the sky in a small town near the French city of Lille. At the beginning of the 19th century, a "shrimp rain" in Denmark lasted 20 minutes. In February 2010, a two-day "fish rain" occurred in the town of Rajamanu in northern Australia. In July, residents of the town of Jagtial in the southern Indian state of Trangana witnessed the same weather phenomenon.

Local news reports on the fish rain in India | YouTube Yoro Province of Honduras, a mountainous country in Central America, has a "fish rain" every summer. When the storm sweeps through the town, local residents pick up fish still alive by the roadside in buckets, which they call the Lluvia de Peces phenomenon.

There is a widely spread legend that in 1856, Honduras was very backward and poor, and its people often lived without enough to eat. A Spanish priest named Jose Manuel Subilana came to Honduras and prayed to God to help the local poor have enough to eat. God was moved by the priest's sincerity, so there was a "fish rain". Since 1989, Yorro Province has held parades and celebrations every year to celebrate the Lluvia de Peces festival, thanks to the food.

Fish: this is the real "free"! | reference [2] Legend is of course only a legend, and many scientists have done a lot of research on it and found that most of the reasons for the frequent occurrence of such incidents are waterspouts (also known as dragon water absorption). It is a kind of tornado that occasionally appears over warm water) or tornado (also known as land tornado).

Like a tornado, a mature waterspout consists of a low-pressure central vortex and a funnel spinning updraft, and the central vortex is strong enough to "suck" fish, shrimp, sea turtles and even crabs from the sea like a vacuum. The creatures in the sea will fly some distance with the waterspout, until the waterspout loses its power, and the objects accumulated in it will land on land in the form of "rain".

Tornadoes and waterspouts may lift animals into the air and "banish" them miles away. [3] Honduras is a coastal island country right between the Caribbean and the Pacific. Large schools of fish gather with the northward warm Atlantic current in spring and summer, when the north-south cold and warm currents converge, weather conditions are extremely unstable, and severe disasters such as waterspouts or hurricanes at sea are more likely to roll up schools of fish that feed in shallow waters.

Do you know the blood rain?

"Blood Rain" in the bloodshed is not only a description in idioms, but also a natural phenomenon that has really happened.

"Blood Rain" first appeared in France in 1608, but at that time, science and technology was not developed, and people regarded it as an unsolved mystery, causing a lot of panic and speculation.

On May 15, 1890, there was a sudden "blood rain" in the village of Messinadi in Bracaria, Italy. The Italian Meteorological Agency explained that the migratory birds were hit by a storm, and the injured blood fell along with Rain Water to form a blood rain. but no dead birds were found at that time, which is not authoritative.

Red Rain Water flooded the whole village | wikipedia A study published in Phylogenetics and Evolutionary Biology magazine confirmed that the red in the rain was caused by spores of Trentepohlia annulata, an European microalgae of the genus Orange algae, which had only been reported in Austria before.

The study confirmed that "blood rain" is nothing more than a survival mechanism adopted by the algae, which use the "intercontinental flight" of clouds to float spores (similar to plant seeds) from Austria across the Arabian Sea to other regions. and then quickly settle in other places with the help of Rain Water.

Microscopic photos of particles in the red Rain Water sample | wikipedia, however, not all "blood rain" is caused by microalgae spores, but more likely some red chemicals are mixed into Rain Water, such as brown dust in the desert or mineral dust from volcanic eruptions. Its occurrence is similar to that of microalgal spores, where the air flow over a place traps the red matter, floats for a long time, and finally mixes and lands with Rain Water.

Orange snow. Do you think snow is only white?

No, it's also orange, just like a smoothie doused with Fanta soda.

The orange snow comes from fine sand from the Sahara Desert, which goes through a "round-the-world trip" and finally falls to the ground in the rain and snow. This happens about every five years, according to CNN, and the orange snow in 2018 was particularly bright because of a massive sandstorm in the Sahara Desert.

The orange snowy slopes of the Russian ski resort in Sochi look like deserts on the surface of Mars. The Guardian this is not the first time people have seen such a strange snowy color. A similar phenomenon occurred in three regions of southern Siberia as early as 2007.

The orange snow falling from the sky is not only smelly, but also feels greasy, and its iron content is reported to be four times the normal level, and investigators speculate that it is caused by pollution from the nearby oil industry.

Watermelon snow (Watermelon snow) is a kind of snow that is reddish or pink and smells of fresh watermelon. When it melts, it becomes redder, like the color of red wine. This type of snow usually occurs in high mountains and coastal polar regions around the world in late spring or summer, such as the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California.

The watermelon snow on Mount Rainier is said to taste a little sweet. | wikipedia watermelon snow is red because there is a single-celled green algae called Chlamydomonas nivalis, which is rich in astaxanthin (a kind of carotenoid) and chlorophyll.

The red algae go dormant when the temperature is below the freezing point of the water, and when the climate warms up, the rising temperature "activates" astaxanthin in the algae, turning red to protect themselves from the sun's destructive ultraviolet radiation.

However, the existence of this algal substance will reduce the reflectivity of snow and ice to solar radiation by 13% to 20%, increase the absorption of sunlight, thus accelerate the melting of ice and snow, make more algae "wake up", and then fall into a vicious circle. So, in a sense, watermelon snow is not a pollution problem, but it is not a good thing for polar ice caps.

As algae multiply and cover snow faster, it is likely to be one of the driving forces behind the melting of the polar ice sheet.

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(photo Source YouTube) Cat: the sky falls on dried fish! And such a good thing?

Reference:

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/strange-rain-why-fish-frogs-and-golf-balls-fall-skies-180956527/

[2] https://www.segemastic.com.ng/2015/04/photos-fish-rain-in-thailand-fishes.html?m=1

[3] https://www.loc.gov/everyday-mysteries/meteorology-climatology/item/can-it-rain-frogs-fish-and-other-objects/

[4] https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/unravelling-the-blood-rain-mystery/article7057859.ece

Gangappa, Rajkumar Gangappa; Stuart Hogg (22 November 2012). "DNA unmasked in the red rain cells of Kerala". Microbiology. 159 (Pt 1): 107-11. Doi:10.1099/mic.0.062711-0. PMID 23175506.

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/26/orange-snow-transforms-eastern-europe-into-mars

Https://oceanconservancy.org/blog/2020/03/04/what-is-watermelon-snow/

This article comes from the official Wechat account: take Science Home (ID:steamforkids), written by A Xian, revision: Skin

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