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The theory that Edvard Munch’s iconic The Scream (Skrik) has its sky coloured by memories of the eruption of Krakatoa, which made the sunsets very dramatic in the whole of the Western Hemisphere for an entire year a decade prior to the work’s painting has been circulating since 2004 (the year it was stolen from an Oslo museum—to be recovered two years later. Now, however, geoscientists and meteorologists (it’s strange to think that the weather reporter is the only scientist that many of us see on regular basis) believe the swirling clouds may represent a recently classified but rarely occurring formation called a polar stratospheric or mother-of-pearl cloud, which become iridescent when the winter sun dips below the horizon.