00:03This is a photo taken from space, captured by NASA's Terra Satellite.
00:08It's looking at the effects of climate change, specifically its impacts on our planet's atmosphere.
00:13What you're seeing here is the southern tip of Florida.
00:16However, there's a strange phenomenon hidden within this picture right here.
00:19These are what are often referred to as hole-punch clouds, or what scientists call cavum clouds,
00:25because they look like a hole was literally punched straight into the sky.
00:28They were first documented in the 1940s.
00:31But how and why they form was only discovered this century, and it turns out they're man-made.
00:36The whole phenomenon begins when an airplane moves through mid-level alto cumulus clouds.
00:41These types of clouds consist of supercooled moisture droplets,
00:44and when an aircraft bursts through one of them, it creates a cavum that grows and grows, like this.
00:49Studies have found that the shallower the angle of the aircraft, the larger the cavum cloud hole.
00:53So no extraterrestrials, unfortunately, something they have often been mistaken for before.
00:58These cavum clouds were captured just off the west coast of the Sunshine State,
01:02near the Miami International Airport, where more than a thousand flights take off every day.
