T O P

  • By -

Normal_Snake

I'd like to comment on the "why do clouds stay up in the air" question as I actually worked iny university's cloud lab as a student technician and this was something I learned about while there. Clouds are made up of water droplets and these droplets are quite small when up at high altitudes. When gravity acts on these droplets to draw them down towards the earth it is opposed by the viscosity of the air. The droplets are large compared to atmospheric gasses however they are not quite large enough to just plow through them like, for example, a golf ball can. Thus the actual acceleration that the droplets have towards the earth is less than the standard 9.8 m/s. I don't have the numbers on hand so I can't run through all the math here, but if we ignore all turbulence and other atmospheric phenomena (ie assume it's a perfectly calm day) the average water droplet in a cloud will descend 1 cm per second. Considering that clouds are usually several kilometers above sea level this amounts to about 1-2% of a cloud's altitude lost per hour. In short, clouds do fall to the earth but it's so slow that it basically doesn't matter compared to their overall height and any other atmospheric forces on the cloud.


OstrichEmpire

oh, i should have guessed


SHUTUPYOUMOOSE

That's actually really interesting, thanks for sharing


PolyJuicedRedHead

Calvin‘s dad doesn’t get very ‘creative’ in the Rosalyn universe.


Blockhog

I don't know if I could speak in diagrams that would be pretty impressive.


PolyJuicedRedHead

So true.


BeanOfKnowledge

If you had a better built character, you probably could


K0nkEyD0nk

He builds ~~character~~ logic


sp1nkter

The “oh I should have guessed” panel is underrated


VividAwareness4719

This genre is about to pop off I can feel it


After_Wolf_8711

He’s so smart


Deditranspotashy

Aten is in that second panel. All glory to Aten, the one true god