8 weird things you never knew about rain

It may be covered with ice, but Antarctica gets only 16.5 cm of rain or snow per year, making it the continent with the lowest annual rainfall by far. On the other end of the spectrum, Lloro, Colombia, absorbs more than 1270 cm of rainfall per year.

In dry, hot places, rain sometimes evaporates before it hits the ground. Environmentalist Edward Abbey describes ‘phantom rain’ this way: “You see curtains of rain dangling in the sky while the living things wither below for want of water. Torture by tantalising, hope without fulfillment. Then the clouds dissipate into nothingness.”

On Venus, and other moons and planets, rain is made of sulphuric acid or methane. Even stranger, on a planet 5000 light years away, scientists found raindrops made of iron rather than water.

Now if you think that’s mindblowing, you’ll probably want to read about these 30 amazing brain facts.

Generally speaking, if you see a cumulonimbus cloud (a tall, puffy cloud that looks flat at the top), or a nimbostratus cloud (a flat low-level grey cloud), you can be fairly certain that rain is in the 24-hour forecast.

Water doesn’t smell like anything, so why does rain produce a pleasant aroma after it falls? Well, it’s because of a molecule, called geosmin, created by soil-dwelling bacteria. When rain falls it creates air pockets, which contain small amounts of geosmin. The rain traps and then releases these air pockets, dispersing geosmin into the air, where it’s free to travel to human sniffers. The smell of rain even has a name: ‘Petrichor’.

The ‘raindrop’ designation is actually a misnomer, since scientists have concluded that rain is not actually shaped like a teardrop. When water molecules condense and bind together in the atmosphere before falling, they form a more-or-less spherical shape. As they fall, they encounter air pressure, flattening the bottom of the drops, so that they end up taking on a shape more like a hamburger bun.

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Scientists have discovered fossils containing indentations of raindrops dating back as far as 2.7 billion years ago. According to Scientific American, the early liquid rain fell on layers of ash from volcanic eruptions, and then more ash fell on top, preserving the miniature craters of raindrops. Interestingly, it was erosion created by more rain that exposed the rain fossils for modern study.

Run! As Henry Reich, the person behind the YouTube Channel MinutePhysics, explains, the faster you get out of the rain, the drier you’ll be, regardless of the additional raindrops you run into.

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Source: RD.com