'Rain-making' bacteria discovered

November 21, 11:36 AMScience News ExaminerMeg Marquardt

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Photograph from National Geographic by Peter Essick

"In the future, wars will be fought over water, not oil."  That has been a catchphrase of environmentalists for some time and one that is undoubtedly true.  You only need to look at the wildfires burning in California or read Jared Diamond's excellent novel "Collapse" (an intense look into why civilizations rise and fall) to understand that a) our country is especially dry and b) water is precious.  According to Diamond's introduction, the past few hundred years were particularly wet ones for areas around the Colorado River basin, and the cyclic nature of hydration in that region points towards continuing drought for some time to come.  And this says nothing of the drought arid, desert areas will face in the coming decades.

So wouldn't it be wonderful if scientists could make the sky rain on command?  Researchers at Louisiana State University (LSU) have found "rain-making bacteria" – highly efficient bacteria that serve as ice-forming catalysts in the atmosphere.  When ice clouds are a first step in the process of precipitation, be it snow or rain.  Could the bacteria be used to form rain through man-made manipulations?

Brent Christner, assistant professor of biological sciences at LSU, is the researcher behind the discovery.  The study shows that the so-called ice-nuclei bacteria exist everywhere -- from plants and vegetation to snow in the Antarctic.  These ice-nuclei bacteria can also do harm to plants, causing freezing damage and disease, costing agricultural companies and farms over $1 billion dollars a year.  Christner suggests that the distribution of the species through rain or snow is one way these plant bacteria survive, allowing them to move form dead hosts to living ones.

But how about manipulating these bacteria to create storms in areas that are in desperate need of water?  Probably not at the moment.  Though intriguing, scientists still have a large gap in understanding just how the ice nuclei work in the true atmosphere (as opposed to in the controlled setting of a lab), and much more research must be done.  However, Christner is excited about the prospect that "the atmosphere may represent an environment for life" to grow and flourish, opening a whole new frontier for biological studies.