Fog and bacteria
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Cool beans.
A new study is changing the way we think about fog.
Turns out it's not just an amorphous blob of water droplets: "We found that millions of bacteria inhabit ... fog droplets," study co-author Ferran Garcia-Pichel of Arizona State University, said in an email to USA TODAY.
In fact, the research team found that bacteria floating in tiny fog droplets are alive, growing and breaking down pollutants in the air.
"Not only are they there, they are actively consuming atmospheric pollutants, and likely also growing in them. Fog is a habitat," he said.
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The fog rolls in here off of the Gulf. It's thick and reaches much higher than a human being stands. If happens at night and at dawn before the sun's heat inversion lifts it away. It doesn't happen often. It's very beautiful.
Speaking of dawn and dusk, our sunrises are more beautiful than anything I saw in Hawaii. The sky is a mixture of blue, white, purple, and pink. A lot of the natural beauty of rural Hawaii was beyond comparison but not the rising or setting sun as far as I remember.
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Thinking about this more, it like the rule you clean from top to bottom. The dust, dirt, etc. naturally is stirred up into the air and then sinks to the bottom. The last thing you do is clean the floor.
I told this story but I had a five hour routine for cleaning my bedroom when I was six. It was like clockwork. It involved tasks like removing window screens, vacuuming them, washing the windows inside and out, polishing the furniture, and so on. It always ended after five house with me brushing the fringe on each side of the wool rug.
I think it's a blessing and a curse to have this OCD and almost a need for minimalist organization and maximum cleanliness. I think it's a curse because it takes a lot of energy but I see it as more of a blessing far and away.
It has given me and will continue to give me the ability to create the minimalism I like and use minimalism to design functional and beautiful, if I do say so myself, interiors (for instance, an audiophile's music listening room combined with a private college dorm room, something I have done, or to design a study from my imagination, my next project.
And as unusual as this might sound or be, I've known actual hoarders, and I wouldn't trade places with one for love or money.
I love the rain. I'm glad the rainy season in here. We're in the worst draught since before I moved home to Florida almost 10 years ago.
Thank you for your posts. I don't always agree with what you post but I almost always find it thought provoking.
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This fog study is really interesting! When I was working for the environmental firm, which has been quite some time now, bioremediation of soil and water was fairly new, at least at a commercially implementable level. Finding out that microbes in air can do this, too, is exciting.
Bioremediation firms at the time were using the fact that microbes in polluted soil and water evolve to consume the contaminants. (Sometimes the breakdown products, both from the microbes and from natural decomposition of the compounds, are worse than the original contaminants. Like all things in nature, it's complicated.)
I never actually worked with a bioremediation contractor, because traditional methods like air strippers and removal/incineration were working at our sites but there were several approaches to getting the contaminant-eating microbes to do your work for you. You could make more of them by improving their conditions, such as injecting oxygen or nutrients. You could cultivate beneficial microbes and add them to the contaminated area. You could do those things in situ or you could remove the soil and do them elsewhere.
Anyway, I imagine that this is going to spur new technologies that use similar approaches to clean our air, which seems like a good thing to me. I wonder if any of the newly discovered airborne consume carbon dioxide? That would be awesome.
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