In the Earth’s atmosphere circulates an astonishing number of viruses, and falls out of it, that is the conclusion reached by scientists from Canada, Spain and the USA. Bacteria and viruses into the atmosphere with small particles of soil and marine steam. For the first time, scientists have calculated exactly how much virus gets into the troposphere from the Earth’s surface, outside of the climate system of the planet, but below the stratosphere, where planes fly. Viruses can carry for thousands of miles before will be again on the Earth’s surface.
Viruses — the most common and one of the least understood of the biological groups on Earth. In his invisible, parallel world on Earth every day they kill half the bacteria in the ocean and penetrate into microbial 10 trillion times per second. Our planet inhabited by 10 billion trillion, trillion viruses: more than the stars in the Universe. If you build a chain of them, they will stretch for 100 million light years.
How many bacteria and viruses per square meter?
“Every day more than 800 million viruses cover every square world planetary surface,” says a virologist at the University of British Columbia Curtis Cattle, one of the senior authors of an article published in International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal.
“About 20 years ago, we began to find genetically similar viruses, scattered in various places around the world,” says Cattle. “This superiority of long-lived virus traveling through the atmosphere probably explains our findings — obviously, the virus travel through the atmosphere from one continent to another.”
SATL and colleagues from the University of Granada and the University of San Diego wanted to know how much of this material is brought above the atmospheric boundary 2500-3000 meters. At this altitude, the particles undergo long-range transport, in contrast to particles lower in the atmosphere.
Using a platform high in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada in Spain, scientists have discovered billions of viruses and millions of bacteria, which appear in square meter every day. The deposition rate of the virus was a 9 — 461 times bigger than bacteria.
“Bacteria and viruses, as a rule, deposited on the Earth during rains and movement of dust from the Sahara. But the rain less effectively removes the viruses from the atmosphere,” says author and microbiologist, Isabel Reche, University of Granada.
Scientists have also discovered that most viruses are transferred signatures, indicating that they rose into the air from a marine couple. Viruses tend to cling to small, lightweight, organic particles suspended in the air and gas, which means that they can stay in the air in the atmosphere longer.
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