14 DAY TRIAL // About a week ago, a biology teacher by the name Karstein Erstad had the shock of a lifetime when, while skiing in the mountains near the city of Bergen in Norway, he came across thousands of earthworms simply lying on the ground.
At first, Karstein Erstad assumed the earthworms were dead. However, when he approached them and picked up a few, he found that they were very much alive and wriggling.
“I saw thousands of earthworms on the surface of the snow,” the biology teacher said. “When I found them on the snow they seemed to be dead, but when I put them in my hand I found that they were alive,” he added, as cited by The Local.
Karstein Erstad's first thought was that the worms had crawled from the ground. However, he dismissed this explanation when he realized they were standing on a layer of snow measuring 0.5 to 1 meter (1.6 to 3.3 feet) in thickness.
Since it was unlikely that the worms had crawled through this much snow, the biology teacher concluded that they must have fallen from the sky. Yup, we're talking worm rain.
Interestingly, it is understood that, after Karstein Erstad's story made headlines, reports of earthworm rains emerged in other corners of Norway as well, including in the municipalities of Lindås and Suldal, and in regions close to the border with Sweden.
A possible explanation
Mother Nature might be a bit of a freak, but it's not (yet) deranged enough to have clouds birth worms instead of water droplets and then sprinkle them all over our favorite skiing slopes.
Instead, biologists and meteorologists say that there is a perfectly sound and reasonable explanation for why Norway has been experiencing earthworm rains these past few days.
Thus, they say that the worms most likely emerged from the ground as they usually do when spring comes around only to be picked up by strong winds and carried over considerable distances.
When the winds carrying them subsided, the worms fell to the ground. By the looks of it, these recent earthworm rains weren't even Norway's first extreme weather events of this kind.
Au contraire, specialists say that reports about worms carried by winds and falling to the ground in a rain-like fashion were also documented back in the 1920s.