Intelligent Design Icon Intelligent Design
Physics, Earth & Space Icon Physics, Earth & Space

Information Spreads in the Atmospheric Highway

Photo: Plume from the Hunga-Tonga volcano, via NASA / Kayla Barron, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Back in August 2017 when I wrote about information storage in the clouds and ecosystems in the atmosphere, it was a new thing. Dust was known to cross oceans, and some bacteria and fungi were known to disperse short distances in the air, but were microorganisms hitching rides to faraway places? In the intervening years, several additional studies have confirmed the presence of microbes in cloud aerosols. Pierre Amato from CNRS in France, lead author of the 2017 study published in PLOS ONE, has since written more about this interesting subject in 2022 and in 2023. The newer papers contain references to similar articles by other teams in a growing field of “cloud ecology.”

Amato’s team had captured cloud aerosols from a mountain summit in France. That method had some drawbacks. Due to wind friction with the surface and differences in air density with altitude, researchers could not be certain that the same results would obtain in the free troposphere higher up. Additionally, it was not clear how high surface winds could loft organisms into the air. 

Now, another research program using airplanes has collected living organisms in the free troposphere where wind flows more freely. Additionally, the researchers detected various atomic elements being transported over distances covering at least 2,000 kilometers. These could be indications of global supply chains in the atmosphere, supplementing Günter Bechly’s recent article here at Evolution News about evident fine tuning in the ocean’s biogeochemical feedbacks. It led him to propose “a system that has been deliberately designed to enable a long-term flourishing of marine life.” Could similar evidence of intelligent design be in operation for land life?

Collecting from Airplanes

The new study by Xavier Rodó and three colleagues was published in PNAS. Here’s what they found:

In this study, data provided by 10 tropospheric aircraft surveys over Japan in 2014 confirm the existence of a vast diversity of microbial species up to 3,000 m height, which can be dispersed above the planetary boundary layer over distances of up to 2,000 km, thanks to strong winds from an area covered with massive cereal croplands in Northeast (NE) Asia. Microbes attached to aerosols reveal the presence of diverse bacterial and fungal taxa, including potential human pathogens, originating from sewage, pesticides, or fertilizers. Over 266 different fungal and 305 bacterial genera appeared in the 10 aircraft transects. [Emphasis added.]

The Planetary Boundary Layer is the lowest layer of the troposphere ranging from 100m to 2,000m. It too is affected by the surface: roughness of the land, wind direction and speed, and radiative forcing. Naturally, this boundary fluctuates with temperature and weather conditions from place to place. Rodó et al. note that 

Limited data exist to date on the magnitude of microorganism propagation in the free troposphere, above the planetary boundary layer (PBL), whether attached to soil dust or to organic aggregates.

Their project, therefore, breaks new ground, or should we say, new air.

Commenting on this project in the same issue of PNAS, Daisuke Tanaka and Fumito Maruyama consider it important for several reasons:

What if microbes could travel long distances, high above the clouds? In PNAS, Rodó et al. present compelling evidence that viable bacteria and fungi can indeed be transported thousands of kilometers in the free troposphere, well above the planetary boundary layer. This remarkable finding has profound implications for our understanding of microbial biogeography, atmospheric ecology, and potentially even human health.

A Global Aeromicrobiome and Element Transport Chain

The findings, they say, “provide strong support for the concept of a global “aeromicrobiome” — a dynamic reservoir of microbes circulating in the atmosphere.” 

This atmospheric microbial pool likely plays an important role in seeding distant terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, potentially influencing microbial biogeography on a global scale.

Understandably, they add, “The global spread of microorganisms through atmospheric transport is restricted to species that can withstand water loss and UV radiation, which become more intense at higher altitudes.” Nevertheless, the troposphere contains most of the water in the atmosphere, and many species of bacteria and fungi form spores to survive desiccation.

In the formal paper, Rodó et al. detected an additional class of materials suggesting design: a variety of chemical elements riding the atmospheric supply chain. Sulfur (S) and sodium (NA) were the most abundant, but many others were detected being transported by high altitude winds: 

Less prevalent were Al, K, Fe, and Ca (>100 ng m−3), followed by Mg, Zn, Zr, P, Ni, Cr, Ba, and Pb (>10 ng m−3). A range of other trace elements (Mn, Ti, Cu, Sn, As, Se, V, etc.) were also detected but at even lower concentrations (<10 ng m−3). However, only S, K, Zn, Ni, and Sn were present in all 21 samples, with average relative abundances of 52%, 7.8%, 2.2%, 1.8%, and 0.1%, respectively.

Bechly’s article discussed feedbacks that govern the availability of trace elements in the ocean. Here we see at least 21 elements in the 21 samples — many of them necessary for life — moving across the earth in high altitude winds. I might add that these are not the only sources. Meteoritic dust and meteorites can bring minerals from space, and volcanoes can send elements from the mantle far into the atmosphere. On January 15, 2022, the Hunga-Tonga volcano sent a plume of dust 38 miles high! And on September 16, 2024, Australian National University scientists found that extinct volcanoes are rich sources of the rare earth minerals highly sought after for technology. When considering the habitability of astrobiological targets like Titan and Enceladus, the availability of systems for dispersal of vital elements should not be ignored.

Limitations and Conclusions

The data collection experiments by Rodó et al. only took place on ten flights over Japan, where the samples were dominated by aerosols coming from farmlands in Asia that included sewage and pesticides. This explains the abundances of some of the species and elements in the samples. Also, they tended to focus on pathogenic species, not on potential benefits of the aeromicrobiome and element dispersal mechanisms. They were concerned that antibacterial resistance genes could spread far and wide in the atmospheric highway.

While true that many of the species identified are pathogenic, one must remember that “the dose is the poison.” Tiny concentrations of pathogens are in and around us all the time, and a pathogen on the skin may act differently than one in the gut. As Michael Behe has discussed in one of his videos, bacteria for the most part are “superheroes” that are helpful to the biosphere. The same could be said for fungi. 

The authors understand these limitations and point to their work as just a beginning. Their conclusion states, 

While our study does not necessarily prove causality between the presence of known human pathogens in bioaerosols and health effects, it does pave the way for further research along these lines. This future avenue could examine the exchange of microbial pathogens across very long distances and of very different sorts of pathogens (bacteria, fungi, and viruses as well, although not specifically addressed in this study). Our results introduce a novel perspective on the potential transmission routes of bioaerosol particles and their association with human, plant, and animal diseases, suggesting a need for further research to explore potential mechanistic connections in more detail.

For design advocates, these discoveries suggest foresight in the design of the biosphere. Knowing that living things would require chemical elements and networks of organisms, the designer of the earth set up systems to provide them. It’s also astonishing to consider the presence of coded genetic information everywhere scientists look: high in the clouds, in the depths of the sea, and just about everywhere in between.