ENST: Information Spreads in the Atmospheric Highway
DNA travels the globe.
This article was printed by
Evolution News last October
Information Spreads in the Atmospheric Highway
by David Coppedge
Evolution News and Science Today, October 17, 2024
Back in August 2017 when I wrote about information storage in the clouds and ecosystems in the atmosphere, it was a new thing. Dust was known to cross oceans, and some bacteria and fungi were known to disperse short distances in the air, but were microorganisms hitching rides to faraway places? In the intervening years, several additional studies have confirmed the presence of microbes in cloud aerosols. Pierre Amato from CNRS in France, lead author of the 2017 study published in PLOS ONE, has since written more about this interesting subject in 2022 and in 2023. The newer papers contain references to similar articles by other teams in a growing field of “cloud ecology.”
Amato’s team had captured cloud aerosols from a mountain summit in France. That method had some drawbacks. Due to wind friction with the surface and differences in air density with altitude, researchers could not be certain that the same results would obtain in the free troposphere higher up. Additionally, it was not clear how high surface winds could loft organisms into the air.
Now, another research program using airplanes has collected living organisms in the free troposphere where wind flows more freely…..
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