Scientists Are Just Beginning to Understand How Life Makes Clouds, and Their Discoveries May Drastically Improve Climate

[Judi Lynn]

Scientists Are Just Beginning to Understand How Life Makes Clouds, and Their Discoveries May Drastically Improve Climate Science

Plants, plankton and sea spray all release elements that help the atmospheric blankets form

Max G. Levy
June 26, 2025

On a warm day in January of last year, Martin Heinritzi peered from a window of his research plane, spotting Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. “We were focused on what is directly coming out of the reef,” says Heinritzi, an atmospheric scientist with Goethe University Frankfurt. The bustling marine ecosystem was hard to see, even flying just 1,000 feet above. Fortunately for Heinritzi, this plane could smell it. The craft was outfitted with chemical sensing instruments that collect vapors and particles in the sky above the ocean.

Tiny algae called phytoplankton release gases that cascade changes in the atmosphere. When the conditions are right, these microscopic marine creatures help form clouds. And Heinritzi is one of a growing class of scientists learning how invisible byproducts of life can shape giant features like clouds that allow scientists to more accurately predict future climate.

Clouds play an important role in regulating the climate. Bright ones at low altitudes generally reflect solar energy away, whereas wispier ones up to 20,000 feet tend to trap heat. For atmospheric scientists to incorporate clouds into models that simulate and predict climate, they’re learning more about the biology of where clouds come from.

Dust from the Sahara is a famous source of “seeds” for clouds. So are industrial pollutants, like sulfuric acid and ammonia gases, which collide with other molecules in the atmosphere to form aerosols. These aerosols readily collect water vapor, growing larger and larger, and then hang by other droplets in visible blobs we call clouds. In the last several years, researchers have discovered that living beings contribute more to Earth’s clouds than expected thanks to gases from plants and plankton, and sea spray that propels microorganisms and proteins skyward. In other words, biological particles gather moisture both differently and similarly to how dust and pollution do—or: Life makes clouds.

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-are-just-beginning-to-understand-how-life-makes-clouds-and-their-discoveries-may-drastically-improve-climate-science-180986872/