Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Real science: How fish can "rain" from the sky!

From "Raining fish in Australia" in Boing Boing: "The phenomenon has been documented around the world and is believed to be cause by small twisters or waterspouts.

As they pass over water small fish can be sucked up into the clouds and kept there as the cloud moves over land.

Eventually they fall from the cloud to the ground, inevitably surprising any people who see them."

What I don't understand is "kept there". The moment twister gives way, I would expect it to fall. Or are clouds less flimsy than I thought?

2 comments:

Arvind Mishra said...

I do not believe that they fall from the clouds -as a matter of fact fishes have the tendency to go against the water current and whenever there is heavy downpour they ascend to uplands even up to very long distances through the incoming water currents to the places which abounds in fishes -and after the rain is over people are surprised to see lot of fishes in the places which did not posses any fish earlier!

Tinkoo said...

You are the fisheries expert, Arvind.

But the report the source quoted said there was no water source or floods anywhere near the region! And apparently, reports that fishes had been seen falling from the sky!