A 400-mile blanket of fog has socked in California\u2019s Central Valley for weeks. Scientists and meteorologists say the conditions for such persistent cloud cover are ripe: an early wet season, cold temperatures and a stable, unmoving high pressure system.<\/p>\n
But take a stroll through X, Instagram or TikTok, and you\u2019ll see not everyone is so sanguine.<\/p>\n
People are reporting that the fog has a strange consistency and that it\u2019s nefariously littered with black and white particles that don\u2019t seem normal. They\u2019re calling it \u201cmysterious\u201d and underscoring the name \u201cradiation\u201d fog, which is the scientific descriptor for such natural fog events \u2014 not an indication that they carry radioactive material.<\/p>\n
An X user with the handle Wall Street Apes posted a video of a man who said he is from Northern California drawing his finger along fog condensate on the grill of his truck. His finger comes up covered in white.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat is this s\u2014 right here?\u201d the man says as the camera zooms in on his finger. \u201cThere\u2019s something in the fog that I can\u2019t explain … Check y\u2019all … y\u2019all crazy … What\u2019s going on? They got asbestos in there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another user, @wesleybrennan87, posted a photo of two airplane contrails crisscrossing the sky through a break in the fog. <\/p>\n
\u201cFor anyone following the dense Tule (Radiation) fog in the California Valley, it lifted for a moment today, just to see they\u2019ve been pretty active over our heads …\u201d the user posted.<\/p>\n
Scientists confirm there is stuff in the fog. But what it is and where it comes from, they say, is disappointingly mundane.<\/p>\n
The Central Valley is known to have some of the worst air pollution in the country. <\/p>\n
And \u201cfog is highly susceptible to pollutants,\u201d said Peter Weiss-Penzias, a fog researcher at UC Santa Cruz. <\/p>\n
Fog \u201cdroplets have a lot of surface area and are suspended in the air for quite a long time \u2014 days or weeks even \u2014 so during that time the water droplets can absorb a disproportionate quantity of gasses and particles, which are otherwise known as pollutants,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He said while he hasn\u2019t done any analyses of the Central Valley fog during this latest event, it\u2019s not hard to imagine what could be lurking in the droplets.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt could be a whole alphabet soup of different things. With all the agriculture in this area, industry, automobiles, wood smoke, there\u2019s a whole bunch\u201d of contenders, Weiss-Penzias said. <\/p>\n
Reports of the fog becoming a gelatinous goo when left to sit are also not entirely surprising, he said, considering all the airborne biological material \u2014 fungal spores, nutrients and algae \u2014 floating around that can also adhere to the Velcro-like drops of water.<\/p>\n
He said the good news is that while the primary route of exposure for people of this material is inhalation, the fog droplets are relatively big. That means when they are breathed in, they won\u2019t go too deep into the lungs \u2014 not like the particulate matter we inhale during sunny, dry days. That stuff can get way down into lung tissue.<\/p>\n
The bigger concern is ingestion, as the fog covers plants or open water cisterns, he said. <\/p>\n
So make sure you\u2019re washing your vegetables, and anything you leave outside that you might nosh on later.<\/p>\n
Dennis Baldocchi, a UC Berkeley fog researcher, agreed with Weiss-Penzias\u2019 assessment, and said the storm system predicted to move in this weekend will likely push the fog out and free the valley of its chilly, dirty shawl. <\/p>\n
But, if a high pressure system returns in the coming weeks, he wouldn\u2019t be surprised to see the region encased in fog once again. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 400-mile blanket of fog has socked in California\u2019s Central Valley for weeks. Scientists and meteorologists say the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":460182,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[6516,2385,210157,746,41513,25633,35699,210161,55760,210160,159,61206,29013,208733,67,132,68,210159,2452,210158],"class_list":{"0":"post-460181","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-central-valley","9":"tag-day","10":"tag-droplet","11":"tag-environment","12":"tag-finger","13":"tag-fog","14":"tag-long-time","15":"tag-peter-weiss-penzias","16":"tag-radiation","17":"tag-radioactive-material","18":"tag-science","19":"tag-scientist","20":"tag-stuff","21":"tag-surface-area","22":"tag-united-states","23":"tag-unitedstates","24":"tag-us","25":"tag-water-droplet","26":"tag-week","27":"tag-x-user"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115752405740759923","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/460182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}