I have never heard of anything like this happening anywhere else on this earth. I had read about it in a book on Antarctic meteorology available here. Now I have seen it as well.
One fine day, or rather night was an absolutely clear, windless, moonlit night. There was no trace of clouds anywhere. The temperature was in the vicinity of -25ºC. It had fallen rapidly after the weather cleared off in the morning. I went out to see what the weather was like. I saw some
> snowflakes flitting around against the light. I looked around to see if there were any clouds. There were none. Where was this snow coming from? The only possibility I could think of was that the wind was probably blowing it from somewhere. But there was no wind. The snow flakes had no business to be there. I told this to the station meteorologist. He had a look at the 'snowfall' and then told me that this was a phenomenon known as 'clear sky precipitation' that is peculiar to Antarctica.
Clear sky precipitation is the only form of precipitation in the interiors of the Antarctica continent. The interior does not have any cloud formation because it is so far away from the sea. It is always clear over there. This kind of precipitation occurs when the water vapour in the air freezes and falls from the sky as snow. It is actually frost that is seen all over the world, but because of extremely low temperatures present in the Antarctic interiors (of the order of -50ºC) it actually falls from the sky. The precipitation by this method is minimal, but since the snow never melts in the interiors, it accumulates over centuries and forms the huge Antarctic ice cap.
I wonder how many more gems like this Antarctica has in store for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment