NASA Captures Photo of Mysterious ‘Cluster’ of Hole-Punch Clouds Over Florida

Amaze Lab

NASA’s Terra satellite was looking to document the effects of climate change on our planet’s atmosphere. Instead it captured photos of a strange phenomenon in the skies over Florida.

Transcript

00:00 [Music]

00:03 This is a photo taken from space, captured by NASA's Terra satellite.

00:08 It's looking at the effects of climate change, specifically its impacts on our planet's atmosphere.

00:13 What you're seeing here is the southern tip of Florida.

00:16 However, there's a strange phenomenon hidden within this picture right here.

00:19 These are what are often referred to as hole-punch clouds, or what scientists call cavern clouds,

00:25 because they look like a hole was literally punched straight into the sky.

00:28 They were first documented in the 1940s, but how and why they form was only discovered this century,

00:34 and it turns out they're man-made.

00:36 The whole phenomenon begins when an airplane moves through mid-level altocumulus clouds.

00:41 These types of clouds consist of supercooled moisture droplets,

00:44 and when an aircraft bursts through one of them, it creates a cavern that grows and grows, like this.

00:49 Studies have found that the shallower the angle of the aircraft, the larger the cavern cloud hole.

00:53 So, no extraterrestrials, unfortunately, something they have often been mistaken for before.

00:58 These cavern clouds were captured just off the west coast of the Sunshine State,

01:02 near the Miami International Airport, where more than a thousand flights take off every day.

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