Many Viruses 'Are Falling From The Sky,' Study Finds
- 6 years ago
A new study has revealed astounding information about how some viruses manage to spread far and wide.
A new study has revealed astounding information about how some viruses manage to spread far and wide. An international team of researchers found an immense number of them get swept up into the Earth's troposphere, travel across the sky for up to thousands of miles, and fall back to the ground. "Every day, more than 800 million viruses are deposited per square metre above the planetary boundary layer—that's 25 viruses for each person in Canada," Curtis Suttle, one of the team's members, who hails from the University of British Columbia, noted. "Roughly 20 years ago we began finding genetically similar viruses occurring in very different environments around the globe," he further commented. "This preponderance of long-residence viruses travelling the atmosphere likely explains why—it's quite conceivable to have a virus swept up into the atmosphere on one continent and deposited on another." The team also found that most viruses falling from the sky do so via rain and Saharan dust migrations, and the majority of them originally become airborne through sea spray.
A new study has revealed astounding information about how some viruses manage to spread far and wide. An international team of researchers found an immense number of them get swept up into the Earth's troposphere, travel across the sky for up to thousands of miles, and fall back to the ground. "Every day, more than 800 million viruses are deposited per square metre above the planetary boundary layer—that's 25 viruses for each person in Canada," Curtis Suttle, one of the team's members, who hails from the University of British Columbia, noted. "Roughly 20 years ago we began finding genetically similar viruses occurring in very different environments around the globe," he further commented. "This preponderance of long-residence viruses travelling the atmosphere likely explains why—it's quite conceivable to have a virus swept up into the atmosphere on one continent and deposited on another." The team also found that most viruses falling from the sky do so via rain and Saharan dust migrations, and the majority of them originally become airborne through sea spray.