The splendor of a solar eclipse is unique to our world — nowhere else in the solar system does a planet’s moon so perfectly block the light of the sun. The fast and fleeting darkness of those events affects many things on Earth, including animal behavior and waves in the ionosphere. Researchers have now found that cumulus cloud cover fell by more than a factor of 4, on average, as the moon’s shadow passed over Earth during a recent annular eclipse. This little-studied aspect of solar eclipses has important lessons for geoengineering efforts aimed at blocking sunlight, the team proposed.
Experiments in the sky
Solar eclipses occur anywhere from 2 to 5 times per year, and these events confer neat opportunities for scientific investigations, said Victor J. H. Trees, a geoscientist at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. “Solar eclipses are unique experiments.” They allow researchers to study what happens when sunlight…
