Marsh Will-o’-the-Wisps Sparked by Strange Chemistry

‘Ghost Fire’ in Marshes Sparked by Strange Chemistry

By Rachel Nuwer edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier

Some name them will-o’-the-wisps; others name them ignis fatuus, Latin for “foolish fire.” Whatever the identify, for hundreds of years individuals have reported seeing these eerie, faint blue flames hovering over marshes, bogs and different wetlands. Various cultures interpreted the ephemeral aberrations as fairies, ghosts or spirits. Scientists have provided a unique rationalization: they type when methane and different gases from decaying materials react with oxygen and briefly ignite, producing a flamelike glow.

For scientists, although, one large thriller nonetheless remained. Although will-o’-the-wisps should not precise flames and happen at ambient temperatures, they nonetheless must ignite one way or the other. The supply of that ignition has been unknown.

Now a brand new paper revealed in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA seems to provide an answer: microlightning, or tiny, spontaneous sparks of electrical energy that happen due to variations in costs on water droplets’ surfaces. These droplets type when water bubbles containing methane rise and burst on the floor of the marsh, and the ensuing sparks ignite the methane to create will-o’-the-wisps’ telltale luminescence.

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“Your first reaction when you hear about this finding might be ‘Okay, will-o’-the-wisps are these ghostly, spooky things, but so what?’” says Richard Zare, a bodily chemist at Stanford University and senior writer of the findings. “In fact, the phenomenon we found—related to how chemistry can be driven at interfaces—is profound.”

Water is impartial, which implies it doesn’t usually carry electrical cost. But as early as 1892, scientists have famous that tiny droplets of water within the air will be positively or negatively charged in conditions corresponding to waterfall spray or fog. What Zare and his colleagues not too long ago found, nonetheless, was that when two oppositely charged droplets get shut to one another, electrical energy can abruptly rush between them, creating microlightning.

Zare and his colleagues first described and coined the term for microlightning in a March examine revealed in Science Advances. In that examine, they confirmed that when water sprays, a few of the ensuing micro droplets choose up reverse electrical costs that may spark flashes of power once they get shut to 1 one other. This spark can drive chemical reactions within the surrounding air that lead to easy natural molecules. Zare and his colleagues hypothesized that this course of may need generated a few of the chemical constructing blocks for all times on Earth.

Although the brand new examine has much less lofty implications, Zare says the mechanism is principally the identical. His staff’s experimental setup was easy: in a beaker of water, the researchers launched bubbles composed of methane and air. They captured high-speed movies of the bubbles hitting the floor of the water, forming micro droplets and producing tiny, faint flashes of sunshine. The staff additionally used mass spectrometry to offer extra proof that the microlightning the researchers noticed generated the power to drive a response between methane and oxygen, changing them into completely different compounds.

The “well-executed” new analysis “strongly suggests” that microlightning is certainly the pure ignition mechanism accountable for will-o’-the-wisps, says Wei Min, a chemist at Columbia University, who was not concerned within the work.

But some mysteries do endure, Min provides. One large unanswered query, for instance, is how, precisely, the robust electrical fields type on the droplets’ floor within the first place. The reply, he says, may have “broad implications to physics, chemistry, biology and engineering.”

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