Sunday 9 January 2022

A Couple Of Days Ago,

I mentioned that Diana and myself would like to see some snow,


here in the UK. normally white would be fine, but seeing this bioluminescent snow that glows blue, could we please have some of that instead! Alexander Semenov/Facebook, from an article at Russia Beyond,

Russian biologist Vera Emelianenko went for a walk to the White Sea coast, high in the Russian Arctic, and noticed something very unusual in the snow – a blue glow that looked like Christmas lights. With Emelianenko were Mikhail Neretin, the son of a molecular biologist working at the same remote field station, and two dogs. It was Neretin who first noticed the strange blue glow, and as they walked to investigate, they noticed that their footsteps created streaks of ethereal blue “like blue Christmas lights in the snow”. Even the dogs left a glowing trail as they raced ahead, and squeezing the glowing snow in the hand only made it glow stronger,

the next day, Vera Emelianenko slipped a snowball of glowing snow under a microscope, and as she waited for it to melt, she spotted some copepods, tiny aquatic crustaceans, in the petri dish. When she poked them with a needle, they lit up a faint blue, indicating that they were the source of the ethereal glow, known as “the bugs of the sea”, these creatures are typically found in the ocean at depths of up to 100 meters during the night, but just a few feet at night, when they can cause the eye-catching bioluminescence phenomenon on beaches, blue snow, what ever next? yellow snow I guess!


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