An amazing number of viruses circulate in the Earth's atmosphere - and drop out of it, scientists from Canada, Spain and the United States have come to this conclusion. Bacteria and viruses enter the atmosphere along with small particles from the soil and sea vapor. For the first time, scientists have calculated how many viruses specifically enter the troposphere from the Earth's surface, outside the planet's climate system, but below the stratosphere, where airplanes fly. Viruses can be carried thousands of kilometers away before they return to the surface of the Earth.
Viruses are the most common and one of the least understood biological groups on Earth. In their invisible, parallel world on Earth, they kill half of the bacteria in the ocean every day and penetrate microbes 10 trillion times a second. Our planet is inhabited by 10 billion trillion trillion viruses: this is more than the stars in the universe. If you build a chain of them, they stretch out to 100 million light years.
How many bacteria and viruses are there per square meter?
"Every day, more than 800 million viruses cover every square world on the planet's surface," says University of British Columbia virologist Curtis Suttle, one of the senior authors of an article published in the International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal.
“About 20 years ago, we began to find genetically similar viruses scattered throughout the world,” says Suttle. "This superiority of long-lived viruses traveling through the atmosphere probably explains our findings - apparently viruses travel through the atmosphere from one continent to another."
Suttle and colleagues from the University of Granada and the University of San Diego wanted to know how much of this material is carried above the atmospheric limit of 2500-3000 meters. At this altitude, particles are subject to long-range transport, in contrast to particles lower in the atmosphere.
Using a platform high in the Sierra Nevada mountains in Spain, scientists have discovered billions of viruses and tens of millions of bacteria that appear per square meter every day. The deposition rate of viruses was 9 to 461 times that of bacteria.
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“Bacteria and viruses, as a rule, are deposited on Earth in the process of rainfall and the movement of dust from the Sahara. But rain is less effective at removing viruses from the atmosphere,”says author and microbiologist Isabelle Rece of the University of Granada.
Scientists have also found that most viruses carry signatures that indicate they were lifted into the air from sea steam. Viruses tend to cling to small, light, organic particles suspended in air and gas, which means they can stay airborne in the atmosphere longer.
Ilya Khel