In Pure Spirit

For open minds

Why is it starting to rain octopus?

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As a freak storm battled the Chinese city of Qingdao social media began to buzz with the term ‘Seafood Rain’. Why?

It was raining octopuses, starfish and molluscs.

The bizarre storm featured winds as fast as 78mph and rain heavy enough to shatter windows. The weather in the Yellow Sea created waterspouts.

This octopus storm isn’t the first time that extreme climate conditions have resulted in sea creatures being sucked out of the sea and blown over land in a storm. Just last year a similar thing happened in the village of Jaffna in Sri Lanka, according to The Mirror who carried the story.

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Do you think we’ll start to see even stranger weather as the climate change takes effect?

Image credit: AsiaWire.

It rained ice cubes in Gatlinburg

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Have you ever seen hail like that? These ice cubes are large enough to hold between your fingers. It seems all too likely that windows will break.

Is the weather getting stranger and do you think the changes are man made or not?

Watch this incredible supercell form

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The weather can be impressive.

In this video from Basehunters we can see the formation of a powerful supercell. Thanks to the timelapse we can see the clouds darken, swirl and become an incredible column of danger.

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What was the most impressive or scary weather you’ve ever been trapped in?

Super rare: Spinning circle of ice caught on camera

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This spinning circle of ice was captured on camera by George Loegering. The retired engineer was out and about on the banks of the Sheyenne River in North Dakota when he witnessed the rare weather phenomenon.

The spinning ice is odd because water normally still water freezes and water flowing quickly enough to swirl and whirl breaks up ice. In this instance experts suggest that there was an eddy in the river at just the right speed and the cold, dense air was just right to encourage the ice to form on top.

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What’s the strangest ice creation – either natural or man made that you’ve seen? Leave us a comment or a link in the comments below.

Would you name storms after US policy makers who deny climate change?

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This video has only been live for two days but it has already had nearly 1.5m viewers. If you’ve not yet seen it it’s funny despite being very serious.

The proposal is that we stop giving topical storms and hurricanes names like “Andrew” and “Sandy” and name them after policy makers who refuse to accept that climate change is happening. Mainly they’re targeting big name politicians from the USA so you might not recognise all the names but the message is clear.

The message is that these politicians have to suffer through horrible news broadcasts of the damage they’re doing as a storm. Sound silly? Not quite; the makers of the video would point out that these politicians are contributing to these damages by refusing to support corrective policies.

If you want to support this you can sign the petition at The Climate Name Change.org

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What do you think of this video? A good way to get a serious message across? Or does this parody make a mockery of all the suffering some storm victims have had to go through?

Mystical cloud wave photographed

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Photographs that some have been described as a “cloud tsunami” have been taken in Flordia and published by MSNBC. The effect can happen when clouds are low and there’s a gentle breeze.

The clouds are not dangerous but helicopter pilots need to be extra careful near them in due to the possiblity of sudden visiblity changes.

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Have you ever seen anything like this before?

Jumping and flickering clouds seem more alien than real

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This video takes a few seconds to kick in – but it’s worth watching, paying attention and finally noticing what seems to be going on?

There’s the question! What just is going on? It seems all too alien. Surely there’s no way clouds could flicker as quickly as that? But they are; take a look.

One theory suggests that a lightning discharge could cause temporary changes in the electric field that causes ice crystals to spin and reflect light differently.

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Have you ever seen anything like this before?

The face of Zeus appears in the clouds

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This YouTube video has had about 2,500,000 views – two and a half million – that shows just how many people were amazed by the formation in the clouds. Of course, that number will only go up. The video has been online for less than a month at the time this blog post was written.

Faces in the clouds are not rare. In order for this video to have been seen so many times you can be rest assured that this formation is impressive.

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Are you impressed? Or do you think all these people have watched a video that shows nothing interesting at all?

The mystery of the alien doughnut clouds

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Radar screens used to track weather patterns have been seen to show giant doughnut sized clouds. The clouds are large enough to circle a small country and vanish as quickly as they appear.

The rings are actually created by the weather messing with the radar technology. The doughnuts occur on radars when snow melts in the atmosphere causing the radar signal to bounce back. The ring’s edge is actually the edge of the radar and the size of the circle in the middle determined by the angle at which the radar points at the sky.

The snow melt can also cause straight lines that run behind one another.

As can be expected, UFO watchers know a thing or two behind these odd radar patterns. Speaking to AOL News, Marc Dantonio of the Mutual UFO Network said;

That doughnut or ring is something called a melting circle, where snow melted and radar picks it up – it’s a very thick area that forms an anomalistic ring,’

“The radar only has a certain range out to which it can go — that’s the outer border of the doughnut. And the inner border of the doughnut is based on the angle that the radar is aiming in the sky.”

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Isn’t that odd? Do you accept the “melting snow in the atmosphere” explanation or do you suspect modern radar is better than that?

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