These electric blue clouds are made from ice crystals and meteorite debris



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Get ready for some sweets, as NASA has unveiled stunning images of high-altitude clouds waving with intense electric blue colors. Known as Mesospheric Polar Clouds (PMCs), these mesmerizing structures form over the poles during the summer and consist of ice crystals that condense around minute fragments of meteors in the upper atmosphere.

On Thursday, NASA released videos and images captured by the PMC Turbo mission balloon launched on July 8 in Esrange, Sweden. The balloon climbed 50 miles from the stratosphere and floated for five days to the west. millions of high-resolution images of CMPs prior to landing in western Nunavut, Canada.

The launching video resumes a farewell nostalgic of one of the scientists, who tells the aerial probe, "we see each other in Canada". If all goes as planned, the PMC Turbo group hopes to fly another balloon in Antarctica in December. , to register the PMC at the South Pole.

As it was not wild enough that these clouds consist of crystallized ice and foreign rock debris, the PMCs are also sculpted by a phenomenon called atmospheric gravity waves. Although they have similar names, they are not the same as gravitational waves, which are a cosmic distortion of space-time. Gravity waves form when a fluid medium, such as water masses or air, is broken by interaction with landscapes and other external forces.

The PMC Turbo balloon monitored how gravity waves were transferring energy to lower atmosphere PMCs. This research could be useful for understanding turbulence, not just the type that causes fear in the heart of nervous leaflets, but turbulent forces on all media and on all planets.

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"This is the first time we are able to visualize the flow of energy from larger gravity waves toward lower instabilities and turbulence in the upper atmosphere," said Dave Fritts, principal investigator of the PMC Turbo mission. "At these altitudes, one can literally see the gravity waves breaking – like the waves of the ocean on the beach – and the cascades towards turbulence."

"From what we've seen up to here, we expect to have a truly spectacular data set of this mission," he noted. "Our cameras have probably been able to capture some really interesting events and we hope they will provide new insights into these complex dynamics."

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