aerosols

It’s Friday: Is it raining where you are?

Megacities — cities with populations equaling or greater than 10 million people — are producing an unprecedented amount of air pollution, according to scientists at the American Chemical Society's annual meeting in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.

Although human-made aerosols sometimes are toxic, natural aerosols from deserts and volcanoes are important contributors to ocean fertilization. Now, new research suggests that natural aerosols have their downside too — and the impact of natural aerosols on ocean organisms could influence predictions of future climate change.

A report from the GEOTRACES cruise across the Atlantic

For decades, scientists have been trying to piece together the enormously complicated puzzle that is the ocean. They have collected many different kinds of information, from trace elements like iron to tritium isotopes, from many different parts of the ocean. Bringing together these disparate pieces to form a more complete picture is crucial to understanding how human activities, the marine food web, the global carbon cycle and the circulation of seawater are all interconnected.

Black carbon — fine particles of soot in the atmosphere produced from the burning of fossil fuels or biomass — has been known to be a health hazard for decades, a major contributor to the thick hazes of pollution hovering over cities around the world.