There’s something living inside of fog. Yes, really, and this new study just discovered it. 

Fog is actually full of so much life that the researchers liken it to a vast aquatic ecosystem unto itself.

What is fog?

To start with the basics, fog is basically just a cloud that is low to the ground: water vapor that has condensed or frozen to form tiny droplets or crystals in the air.

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The most common form of fog is known as radiation fog, and that’s what these researchers collected samples of to test in their study. It typically occurs on clear nights as the ground cools the moist air immediately above it.

Studying fog isn't easy, especially if we want to know how the bacteria in the air changes over the course of hours. We’d want to try to sample the same air before, during and after the fog appears, but wind can move everything around. That’s why this specific type of more still and stagnant fog was used.

Fog as a habitat and what’s living in it

Researchers found millions of bacteria inhabiting the fog droplets. Just enough fog water to fill a thimble has 10 million bacteria.

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"When you take all of the droplets together, the concentration of bacteria is the same as in the ocean," says Garcia-Pichel, also a Regents Professor in the ASU School of Life Sciences.

Scientists have known for a while that bacteria exist in air and clouds, but fog had been a mystery.

(MORE: How does fog form?)

And when observing it under a microscope, the bacteria were getting bigger and dividing, and therefore, there is growth.

And if they’re growing, that means the droplets are a habitat, a “mindset change” in how we see fog, according to the researchers.

Fog harvesting and its impact on the environment

And to make things even more interesting, the stuff living inside of fog is eating. 

More explicitly, one form of bacteria, Methylobacteria, is using formaldehyde as food to support their growth and also breaking it down into carbon dioxide.

Formaldehyde is a nasty form of pollution that’s bad for your health and adds to ozone smog. That means all of those toxin-eating microbes are actually good for us and are helping to clean our air.

(MORE: What is freezing fog?)

And the samples of dry air collected before fog events contained fewer of these bacteria than samples collected immediately after. Meaning the fog could be temporarily boosting their numbers.

The concept of harvesting fog for drinking water has also been up for discussion, but now we need to consider and further study if these air-cleaning benefits are too good to pass up.

Content writer Ada Wood enjoys exploring the stories that science and climate teach us about our natural world and how it influences the way we live in it.