Airborne Bacteria Make It Rain, Researchers Find — It’s always something weird that changes everything.
The fact that bacteria could cause snow and rain was discovered almost by accident in the 1970s by study co-author David Sands, a Montana State University plant pathologist, during his research on Pseudomonas syringae, a microbe that causes ice to form on leaves.
Unable to discover the source of repeatedly infected fields, Sands exasperatedly took to the skies. He did the scientific equivalent of dragging a cup through the clouds — and lo and behold, there was P. syringae.
P. syringae is not the only biological ice nucleator, but it is the most common, and all varieties share a protein structure that provides a scaffold for free-floating water molecules. Once bound to the bacteria and to each other, the water vapors are able to freeze, and eventually fall back to Earth.
In a pure state, water vapors freeze at temperatures below -35 degrees Celsius. Nucleators allow this to happen in warmer conditions, and Christner’s study found that bacteria are the most common warm-temperature nucleators of all.
Researchers never realized bacteria could be so widespread in the clouds, said Christner, because the technologies used to measure fine dust — traditionally seen as the most important nucleator — ignore microbe-sized particles.
“It’s not that these atmospheric scientists are idiots — they’re not,” he said. “But biological nucleators were not previously recognized as being that abundant or important. They’re going to have to revise that.”
