Ship Contrails Left By Ocean Vessels Similar To Airplane Tracks

From Russell McLendon and Mother Nature Network:

It's common to see airplane "contrails," or condensation trails, stretched across the sky. They look a lot like the elongated clouds in the photo above -- except those aren't from airplanes. (They aren't roll clouds, either, despite their similarity to this photo.)

According to NASA, the clouds pictured above were created by ships off the U.S. West Coast. The photo was taken by NASA's Aqua satellite on Feb. 21, revealing a rarely seen maritime twist on familiar airplane contrails.

Clouds normally form when water vapor condenses around a tiny particle, like dust or salt. Ships can spur this process by burning fossil fuels and emitting small aerosol particles, which serve as nuclei for the formation of new clouds. Because the ships are moving quickly across the ocean, these cloud nuclei are left behind like a trail of bread crumbs, providing a "Family Circle"-style track of a ship's travels.

Here's a more detailed explanation from NASA:

In order for such clouds to form, three things must occur. First, the ship must emit small particles in the exhaust, which provide the cloud condensation nuclei. Second, there must be very humid air in the ship's path, and third, the air surrounding the vessel must be non-turbulent. All three conditions were met on the day this image was captured.

NASA has posted photos of "ship tracks" before, including one over the Atlantic Ocean in 2005 and one over the northern Pacific in 2002. The agency says "the exhaust released by ships is not a significant source of pollution," although a 2011 study did suggest airplane contrails may compound the effects of global warming.

Also on Mother Nature Network:
Satellite photo shows Costa Concordia crash
How do you clean up a wrecked cruise ship?
Shipping first in lineup of climate cash solutions
Contrails stoke global warming, cloud formation

Also on HuffPost:

Comments

[worker beenumbed]

08:21 PM on 03/01/2012

Ships burn over 3% of the human caused co2-tax free.It is a hidden subsidy for globalization which renders an advantage to countries with a trade surplus.Norwegian shipping has the numbers.Trading ships make 80,000 visits to the USA each year.

[Iccarus]

08:03 PM on 03/01/2012

So the pollution caused by low altitude con trails (chem-trails) are a by product of off shoring manufacturing jobs to China. Who pays for the ecological damage?

[baxtron]

04:31 PM on 03/01/2012

reflecting that sun away from the earth. thanks pollution.

[Seer Clearly]

07:05 PM on 03/22/2012

Yep, it's been calculated that in the event of some kind of economic or man-made disaster that causes fossil fuel burning to be greatly reduced, global temperatures would jump 3-5 degrees in a few months from the lack of man-made clouds sort of a pent-up global warming demand. It's also a bit scary that we're painting ourselves into a corner: if we cut fossil fuel use, we have to immediately suffer the consequences of prior fossil fuel use.

[baxtron]

04:47 PM on 03/23/2012

as long as more dinosaurs keep dying, there will always be enough fossil fuels forever.

[ThinkCreeps]

01:27 PM on 03/01/2012

Its absolutely nothing like aircraft contrails.

Aircraft contrails form from condensing water from the combustion of the ultra-high-purity fuel.
Ship `contrails' are cloud nucleated by the 3%-sulfur bunker fuel that they burn.