Millions of Tiny Seashells Are Affecting How Clouds Form

(Credit: Kaushik Panchal/Unsplash) For a cloud to appear, it takes more than water vapor. Water won't condense into droplets, or nucleate, without a surface to do so on, and this often takes the form of particles floating around the atmosphere so tiny as to be invisible. Called aerosols, these particles play an important role in everything from the pace of climate change to the water cycle because they influence how clouds form and grow. Natural aerosols come from any number of places: Everything from compounds emitted by plants to geyser steam. One of the biggest sources of aerosols, though, is the ocean. When winds whip the surface into a froth, the bursting bubbles explode into fragments tiny enough to take to the air, where they're sometimes carried high into the atmosphere. Most of these aerosols were thought to be from sea salt, but new research published Wednesday in the journal ...