Farnell Barqué, a researcher on the Meteorological Service of Catalonia in Spain, took an orthodontist good friend’s recommendation: Why not use a CT scanner to disclose the whole inner construction of hailstones?
“The primary consequence was spectacular,” mentioned Barqué in an interview with New Scientist. “Wow! We will see the inside of the stone with out breaking it. We may see completely different layers, with completely different densities.”
Barqué and her colleagues collected 14 hailstones, as much as 8.5 centimetres in diameter, after a extreme storm hit northeastern Spain in 2022. The storm tragically killed one youngster, injured dozens, and induced thousands and thousands of {dollars} in injury.
To review the expansion course of, they wanted to analyse the hailstones’ form and inner layers. Historically, researchers slice hailstones with a scorching knife to look at them. Utilizing the dental scanner provided a brand new, non-invasive strategy.
Impressed by this, Julian Brimelow on the Northern Hail Mission in Canada has scanned smaller hailstones this fashion, due to a dentist’s suggestion.