Southern Russia overwhelmed with purple snow

RT
Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:43 UTC

The very morning following the widely celebrated Woman's Day - people in Southern Russia could not believe their eyes when they found purple snow piled on city streets.

Scientists confirmed a multi-coloured snowfall - ranging from light purple to brown - had landed in Russia's Stavropol Region.

Having analysed the samples, climatologists ruled that the snow is perfectly safe. However, eating purple snow is still not recommended as scientists say it is full of dust from Africa.

A massive dust cyclone rose to upper atmosphere layers and then mixed with regular snow clouds in Russia's South.

So, as a matter of fact, purple snow was an expeditious shipping of African sand beaches to Stavropol region. If it was not for negative temperatures, its residents could already be having sand-bathes.

A similar incident took place some years ago in Russia's Far East.

Comment: Very interesting. According to the media, we are living in a fairy tale, with purple snow and rosy future. While, in fact, the reality is quite different, and far grimmer (no pun intended).

It is not the first time that we hear about the cases of colorful precipitation. Take this and this articles for example. And we are wondering, what's going on?

In one of the previous Connecting the Dots articles, we pondered on a similar topic:

"That reminds us of another interesting event that happened in Siberia at the beginning of 2007.

There is nothing unusual about snow in the towns and endless forests of Siberia. But when locals in the small village of Pudinskoye woke up on Wednesday they immediately noticed something rather strange: the snow falling from the sky was orange...

Russia's environmental watchdog said the snow contained four times higher than normal quantities of iron as well as acids and nitrates.

Curiously enough, there was a sighting of a volleyball size meteorite in a neighboring region two week prior to the orange snow event. And if the meteorite exploded high up in the atmosphere, its very fine particles could easily float around for a couple of weeks or longer. On the other hand, thanks to Victor Clube's work we now know that meteorites are often accompanied by the phenomenon of dust suspended in the atmosphere, so it didn't have to be just an overhead explosion to cause such peculiar precipitation. "

Also, consider the following from Laura Knight Jadczyk's article Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls:

"2001 - 25 July to 23 Sept. - Kerala, India - red rain sporadically fell; staining clothes with an appearance similar to that of blood. Yellow, green, and black rain was also reported. The rains were the result of the atmospheric disintegration of a comet, according to a study conducted at the School of Pure and Applied Physics of the MG University by Dr Godfrey Louis and his student Santosh Kumar. The red rain cells were devoid of DNA which suggests their extra-terrestrial origin. The findings published in the international journal Astrophysics and Space Science state that the cometary fragment contained dense collection of red cells."