It's raining, it's snowing, the microbes are nucleating

The sky is not an ethereal, sterile realm. It's teeming with bacteria, and scientists say that the microbes play a powerful role in producing rain and snow.

While the idea that bacteria could prompt precipitation was previously known, a paper published this week in Science shows that they're more important than anyone expected.

With obvious ramifications for modeling climate change:

The findings raise the question of how climate change and human activities will affect bacterial balances in the sky.

From Wired.

Posted by David on March 1, 2008 9:23 PM