If You Saw Edge of Rain, You’re One in a Million

A giant, roiling mountain of a thundercloud is moving towards you. It’s completely black and goes in stark contrast with the bright blue sky right above and behind you. You see a blinding flash and, in a few seconds, a deafening whip-like crack of thunder.

And then, the rain starts gushing down from above. The wind rises, you see treetops bending low towards the ground some miles away and getting closer by the second. You freeze in place, realizing you can’t escape anyway.

But when the rain almost reaches you, its movement suddenly stops. Just a few feet before you, there’s a veritable flood, but right where you stand, it’s dry and even sunny. And after a short while, the angry thundercloud spills its last drops and disperses.

Seeing the edge of rain is a rare thing but not impossible. The rain has to be really powerful, so that the wind couldn’t diverge the drops from their vertical path. If the rain is light, you’ll only be able to see its edges from far away: it looks like a shimmering gray haze going all the way from the sky to the ground.

The rain shower is over, and... Whoa, what are those clouds? They look extremely sinister! Well, don’t worry, they’re called mammatus clouds, and they’re perfectly safe. They tend to appear before or after a severe storm or a hurricane.

Normally, clouds form thanks to warmer air going up, but these ones form because of cooler air sinking down. It creates pockets made of ice and water, which droop down in distinct lobes. They don’t hold on for too long, though — 15 minutes at the most, and then they’re gone.

The weather could be more bizarre — like raining animals! Back in 2009, the people in Ishikawa, Japan saw a kind of rain no one’s ever seen before — it was raining tadpoles! The first reason is that the wind that day was so strong it lifted and carried all those tadpoles away in no time. The second possible reason is that big birds such as gulls just dropped them while they were flying to their nests.

Some scientists believe these creatures were hauled off the ground by a waterspout and rained down later. By the way, that day, people found not only tadpoles, but also frogs and fish instead of puddles. And yep, it can be raining worms too. Some people claim they’ve seen snake rains, yikes! (You know I have seen horse reins though...)

Rain usually isn’t unusual for Oakville, Washington, but this one still doesn’t have any solid explanation. Instead of common raindrops people watched translucent jelly-like blobs falling down from the skies! Those who got really close to that sort of rain said they felt unwell the next day. Some people think that these might have been evaporated jellyfish, which resulted in rain, or it could simply be some waste from a commercial plane.

Almost the same thing happened in 2012 in Dorset, UK. During a hailstorm, people found gelatin balls together with hailstones. Researchers collected those goopy balls and stored them in a fridge to study later. Turns out, it wasn’t necessary, since the slimy blobs didn’t melt at room temperature.

No one is sure even now about where the balls came from. But the first idea was that those were eggs of some aquatic animal carried by birds right up in the sky.

Later tests proved that the jelly substance was a chemical that acts as a waterlock and is used in many commercial products, even in cables to protect them from water.