![]() In coastal regions, the primary source of bioluminescence is the natural phenomenon of agitated dinoflagellates called lingulodinium polyedra. Coyne says that strangers started contacting him over Instagram, requesting that he alert them each time he witnessed a glow. That video went viral, inspiring the Los Angeles community of bioluminescence hunters to grow during the pandemic. “The world needs to see this - this is literally out of a fairy tale, a movie.” “The second I stopped recording, we were screaming and cheering, and I remember having tears in my eyes,” Coyne said. ![]() ![]() Another two dolphins joined, and Coyne filmed silently, in awe as they lighted up the water on his screen. And then, two dolphins popped up in front of the bow as if to say hello, their weaving shapes gleaming with bright blue light.Ĭoyne was so shocked he dropped his gear, but soon recovered to film the pair. That’s when they saw it: the glow around their boat. Just a few hundred feet from docking at Newport’s harbor, they decided to call it a night. ![]() But the team was cold and tired, and after logging more than 60 miles round trip during what was considered a major bioluminescence event, no marine life had come to play by the boat. It had been a month since the COVID-19 pandemic began and Coyne was eager to shoot something transcendent that he could share with a struggling world - a rare and beautiful confluence of marine life seldom witnessed by human eyes. Cruising out of Newport Beach and down to Dana Point, he and two fellow nature photographers had been sailing on a boat in the pitch dark, hoping to capture a rare moment: dolphins gliding like electric blue eels through bioluminescent plankton. Researchers have seen evidence of such high-energy, short-range discharges in pulses of radio waves from thunderstorms detected by ground-based antennas.Three hours into a chilly night on the water in April 2020, Patrick Coyne was ready to give up. But turbulent mixing high in a cloud may bring oppositely charged regions within about a kilometer of each other, creating very short but powerful bursts of electric current, Neubert says. Normal lightning bolts are formed by discharges between oppositely charged regions of a cloud - or a cloud and the ground - many kilometers apart. The spark that generated the blue jet may have been a special kind of short-range electric discharge inside the thundercloud, Neubert says. From that flashpoint, a blue jet shot up into the stratosphere, climbing as high as about 52 kilometers over several hundred milliseconds. That “blue bang” was a 10-microsecond flash of bright blue light near the top of the cloud, about 16 kilometers high. “The whole thing starts with what I think of as a blue bang,” says Torsten Neubert, an atmospheric physicist at the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby. Understanding blue jets and other upper-atmosphere phenomena related to thunderstorms, such as sprites ( SN: 6/14/02) and elves ( SN: 12/23/95), is important because these events can affect how radio waves travel through the air - potentially impacting communication technologies, says Penn State space physicist Victor Pasko, who was not involved in the work.Ĭameras and light-sensing instruments called photometers on the space station observed the blue jet in a storm over the Pacific Ocean, near the island of Nauru, in February 2019. Now, instruments on the International Space Station have spotted a blue jet emerge from an extremely brief, bright burst of electricity near the top of a thundercloud, researchers report online January 20 in Nature. Whereas ordinary lightning excites a medley of gases in the lower atmosphere to glow white, blue jets excite mostly stratospheric nitrogen to create their signature blue hue.īlue jets have been observed from the ground and aircraft for years, but it’s hard to tell how they form without getting high above the clouds. Scientists have finally gotten a clear view of the spark that sets off an exotic type of lightning called a blue jet.īlue jets zip upward from thunderclouds into the stratosphere, reaching altitudes up to about 50 kilometers in less than a second.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |