Unlike in Sri Lanka, Kerala, red rain is by no means a rare phenomenon. Colored rain in fact has been reported in Kerala as early as 1896 and several times since then. The longest blood rain showers were experienced in 2001 when rain of multi-colored hues of yellow, green, black and red were reported for three consecutive months from July 25 to September 23, staining clothes and water as well as vegetation, according to news reports. The most recent of these red showers was in July this year, lasting for one week. It was initially thought that the rains were colored by fallout from a hypothetical meteor, but a study commissioned by the Government of India is said to have concluded that the rains had been colored by airborne spores from locally prolific terrestrial algae. Several groups of researchers analyzed the chemical elements in the solid particles and different techniques of study gave similar results. The particles were composed mostly of carbon and oxygen with lesser amounts of hydrogen, nitrogen, silicon, chlorine and metals. In an interview with The Nation last July, Buckingham University UK, Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology Director and Cardiff University Prof Chandra Wickramasinghe claimed that life could have hitched a ride on a comet to earth and evolved into the thousands of species that now inhabit the earth. Writing to The Nation regarding the red rain, Prof Wickramasinghe says, We have not examined any samples of the red rain of Sri Lanka, but I have seen some electron micrographs of this material that were sent to me by scientists at the MRI. At first sight it looks uncannily similar to the Kerala red rain which my colleagues and I have been investigating for over five years. The red cells causing the redness of the Kerala rain are undoubtedly biological cells resembling algae. But so far their attempts to identify this known terrestrial algae have proved difficult. We conclude that they have all the characteristics of an alien microorganism.He added that the only reason that scientists have tended to dismiss this possibility is because it is held that life is a purely the Earth-based affair with life originating on our planet four billion years ago. According to him extraterrestrial life is considered by many to be an extraordinary hypothesis that needs extraordinary evidence to support it. Not only is the evidence for panspermia (hypothesis that life exists throughout the universe, distributed by meteoroids, asteroids and planetoids) and extraterrestrial microbes overwhelming, the confinement of life to our tiny planet is the most extraordinary hypothesis of all.Even in the past three months we have found evidence from astronomy, biology and geology that make the old theories of life confined to Earth indefensible. I think life is a truly cosmic phenomenon, and terrestrial life is a manifestation of such cosmic life. It is in this context that I think phenomena like the red rain could be connected with extraterrestrial microbes arriving at the Earth at the present time. In the case of the Kerala red rain a sonic boom was heard prior to the rain. I think a fragment of a comet entering Earth exploded in the high stratosphere and released the red cells that formed the nuclei of raindrops.Prof Wickramasinghes team in the UK have considerable work on the Kerala red rain that was published last year in a paper, Growth and replication of red rain cells at 121oC and their red fluorescence co-authored (by Wickramasinghe, Rajkumar Gangappa, Milton Wainwright, Godfrey Louis and Santhosh Kumar) and the results were presented at the SPIE meeting in San Diego, California. Nicole Mase Kyle Conley
Posted on: Sat, 25 Jan 2014 04:23:39 +0000
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