NASA’s Terra satellite was looking to document the effects of climate change on our planet’s atmosphere. Instead it captured photos of a strange phenomenon in the skies over Florida.
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00 [Music]
00:03 This is a photo taken from space, captured by NASA's Terra satellite.
00:08 It's looking at the effects of climate change, specifically its impacts on our planet's atmosphere.
00:13 What you're seeing here is the southern tip of Florida.
00:16 However, there's a strange phenomenon hidden within this picture right here.
00:19 These are what are often referred to as hole-punch clouds, or what scientists call cavern clouds,
00:25 because they look like a hole was literally punched straight into the sky.
00:28 They were first documented in the 1940s, but how and why they form was only discovered this century,
00:34 and it turns out they're man-made.
00:36 The whole phenomenon begins when an airplane moves through mid-level altocumulus clouds.
00:41 These types of clouds consist of supercooled moisture droplets,
00:44 and when an aircraft bursts through one of them, it creates a cavern that grows and grows, like this.
00:49 Studies have found that the shallower the angle of the aircraft, the larger the cavern cloud hole.
00:53 So, no extraterrestrials, unfortunately, something they have often been mistaken for before.
00:58 These cavern clouds were captured just off the west coast of the Sunshine State,
01:02 near the Miami International Airport, where more than a thousand flights take off every day.