If aliens had visited Earth on this particular day, and visited Cheshire also in particular, they would have spent the day much as did I – on my back, watching the clouds form up and go by. If by some chance they had arrived the day afterwards (and they’re not due for another week according to my diary) they’d have been more likely to have told me what a dull little planet I live on, and to have made excuses and left swiftly. Do the Borg really ever leave the gas on with something in the oven?
If the Borg Collective has taught us one thing it is to telephone ahead to check on the local weather before visiting, thus avoiding meteorological, climatological and picnic-opportunity disappointment.
This was one of those odd, unexpected days that spent a lot of its time being outrageously clothed in clear blue sky and sunshine, amazingly so for early February in England. My solar panels fed, and my buckets of electrons were refilled on solar efforts alone with no need to wake the slumbering diesel. Then in the afternoon the weather decided to add a little bit of drama to the mix.
Armies marched from horizon to horizon, vast smoke signals blotted out the sun and somehow, somewhere, some vast funnel was blasting forth all manner and variety of cloud like an old steamer cleaning its tubes.
I’ve always wondered how much clouds weigh. We tiny flecks of life scurry about on the surface with these vast constructions overhead – what would happen if a cloud suddenly fell out of the sky?
Just how heavy is your average, common or garden cloud?
Well, the answer seems to be fairly mundane and unsurprising once you do the necessary arithmetic.
I searched high, appropriately, and I searched low, less appropriately, for the answer. I searched in fact until the “the search engine” finally gave me a dot co dot uk website rather than some nebulous…
hah! see what I did there? nebulous!
…some nebulous dot com nonsense. As is my wont, I wanted an answer from a Blighty-based or (friendly) colonial source.
Brolliesgalore.co.uk advise that “a small cumulus cloud weighs 4 million grams, or 4000 kg, or if you prefer 4 tonnes” and that’s almost good enough for me. Just need to convert now out of that damned “the metric” nonsense and into something more human, more understandable, something that everyone can grasp.
For the conversion into Imperial Elephant Units I eventually stumbled across Elephantsforever.co.za (near enough a colony) who reckon – after breaking several very nice sets of kitchen scales – that your average domestic elephant can weigh in at between 4,500kg and 6,000kg.
A modest cloud, thus, weighs in at about eight-ninths of an elephant.
For those of you who have difficulty visualising eight-ninths, that’s roughly the whole elephant but with the four hallway umbrella-stands removed.
The blighters we had stampeding across Cheshire here were anything but modest, more like a whole herd of pachyderm endomorphs fleeing from a salad bar, and I suspect that the scales outside Boots The Chemist in the High Street would ask in imperious tones for “one at a time, please, madam”.
Well, naturally, the Authorities got involved, and a hekilopter was sent to investigate.
It flew into the clouds but it did not come out again.
Brave souls, but foolish, for there can be only one result when a hekilopter collides with an ephelump. Hopefully they managed to bail out and parascoot down to earth.
Thing is, do you see, that herd of pachyderms up there may be heavier than the air above them, but they float where they do because they are lighter than the air beneath.
I conclude, thus, that there must be more elephants below the clouds than there are above the clouds, and I think that you must agree that my logic is inescapable.
They never teach that in schools, do they.
It’s all really rather terrifying.
For comparison purposes, my boat, Cardinal Wolsey, has a displacement of some 16,000 meerkats.
I have no idea what would be the outcome should we collide with an elephant.
Perhaps I ought to fetch my gaze down from the sky and direct it more properly to making sure that the canal is clear.
There’s always something to worry about, isn’t there?
Watch the skies.
Chin-chin, chaps.
Ian H.
The Diesel-Electric Elephant Company. 
The sky and all its attendant moods has been my TV for many, many years and it is free, unlike the BBC licence fee. Full colour too, mostly.
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I find that the plots make more sense, too! It cannot be long though before someone in government seeks to control the sky and levy a tax upon us for looking at it… 😉
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Your logic, sir, is impeccable … dare I say even beyond the mortal reach of any pecc to be found on this fair earth. 🙂
Are you in fact acquainted with the Goons? For I detect a culinary whiff of their fair humour in your charming chirography.
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Logic is David to the Goliath of the observable world (short, squat and unpopular at the bookmakers). I must confess that I have an electric typewriter, a wonderful device – I simply plug it in to the National Grid in the morning and then return in the evening to read what it has written… 😉
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Not convinced of your logic but unfortunately since I purchased with hard-earned and not lightly given away elements of the coinic kind, a sky-observing apparatus, the clouds seem to have been inescapable. Perhaps I too am a rain God. Anyway your photographic images are great this time and your words enjoyable. Keep it up, as the invisible tethers do with the clouds.
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A sky-observing apparatus? Are we talking about a telescoping enclosinatrix, to bring celestial objects dangerously closer to the human eye? You are a brave soul indeed to peer into the mysteries of the celestial spheres! Since penning this post I have leared that clouds are, in fact, hollow and filled with helium to keep them afloat… 😉
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Funny, I never thought clouds weighed anything. .. but water is quite heavy so I shouldn’t be surprised. Thanks for the wonderful sky pictures – I’ m sure we get more amazing skies than we used to.
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The [Greek & Roman] gods have obviously decided that I cannot be trusted with the secrets of the clouds, for this morning there is not one in the sky, tis all blue… it won’t last, we’ll be eight-eighths gloom again before tea, I assure you. The sky is indeed fascinating, and since I haven’t entertained a television device for some years, it is now my chief source of viewing material!
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Reblogged this on Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog.
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Thank’ee kindly, sir, your elephant will be on the way directly the Post Office opens in the morning. Would you prefer African or Asian?
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Either will do, Ian, we’re a Multi-Species Community 😄
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We had a storm here recently, where the elephants converted form and then dropped to the earth in large loud hail. And I must say that when they arrive like that, one elephant per cloud seems light.
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The brollies website figure was of course for a modest cloud of some thousand yards or so, like you I reckon that those I photographed were more like the full Imperial Herd. 😉 Should you ever get the opportunity to compare the effects of being hit by a falling cloud with the effects of a falling elephant I urge you to consider your options carefully before proceeding.
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What absolutely wonderful pictures and so good to read someone talking sensible comparisons, I cannot get along with all this new metric nonsense. You are the master of cloud physics!
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I think it important to keep alive the more proper units of measurement. I remember the days when speed limit signs were in Imperial Gargantuan Leaps, when milk was sold by the Imperial Splash and you could go into a sweetie shop and ask for three hours of liquorice please mister. Can’t even remember the last time i had twelve Imperial fall-downs of beer in one night (in a glass with a handle).
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