Scientists Find Tiny Plankton Play Big Role in Global Warming

And once airborne, they help encourage water condensation, forming brighter clouds that reflect additional sunlight.

Satellites use chlorophyll’s green colour to detect biological activity in the oceans.

Plankton is a key factor in the emergence of a bright cloud that can be seen above the Southern Ocean.

A plethora of phytoplankton kick up clouds in the Southern Ocean, researchers report July 17 in Science Advances. The researchers found that plankton “produce airborne gases and natural matter to seed cloud droplets, which result in brighter clouds that mirror extra daylight”.

Plankton aren’t just there to stuff the bellies of hungry fish – they also light up clouds over the Southern Ocean, according to a new scientific study. McCoy and colleagues claim there would be halve the concentration of cloud droplets, in the event we had a “biologically dead ocean”.

While scientists know that phytoplankton is important to Earth’s climate-they reduce Carbon dioxide emissions through photosynthesis-this new studies tell us of yet another function they have that we were previously unaware of: making our planet a little brighter.

“This idea has been floating out there as a hypothesis, but there hasn’t been much evidence”, said cloud expert Robert Wood, a UW professor of atmospheric sciences. This also brings about a corresponding increase in the level of reflection of sunlight.

Using said data, the researchers were surprised to find that the clouds in these regions of water were primarily composed of tiny droplets in the summertime. Sea spray pushes sea salt into the atmosphere which is another large source of aerosols.

Cloud formation is a challenging field of study, leaving many questions unanswered for climatologists.

Co-lead author Daniel McCoy talks about the plankton’s effect. But for now, my day is brightened simply by the knowledge that there are invisible critters up in the sky drawing silver linings around the clouds. This gas gives the particular smell of sulfur to sea water.

– Firstly, marine organisms such as the phytoplankton coccolithophores and Sulfitobacter bacteria among others produce gases such as Sulfitobacter bacteria whose particles seed water cloud droplets. What’s more, summertime plankton blooms form a bubbly scum of tiny organic particles that are easily whipped up into the air. Climate models in the Southern Ocean have been pretty poor in capturing the influence of the clouds by estimating less reflected radiation than what actually exists.

“We have really poor observations of everything in the Southern Ocean, and it’s a really important region”.