She sold sea smells by the seashore
If you’ve ever been to an ocean or gulf, you’ve probably noticed that destinctive, not quite salty, not quite stinky, not quite identifiable smell. Scientists wander barefoot on beaches too, holding hands with the loves of their lives, ducking as seagulls fly overhead, and the odor has peaked their curiousity. And now they’ve riddled this one out:
The smell comes from a gas produced by genes recently identified by researches in ocean-dwelling bacteria.
Understanding how the odorous gas is produced could be important because it is implicated in cloud formation over the ocean and helps some animals find food.
Here’s how it shakes down…
According to a recent article on LiveScience.com, the gas is dimethyl sulfide (I don’t know about you, but that’s my new favorite sulfide). Bacteria break down dying plankton and seaweed producing the vapor as a biproduct.
So, you might be wondering, why in the name of all that is holy and sacred should we care? Well, good old intellectual curiousity is something that drives our culture forward, expands it, improves it, defines it. But there’s more to this than that. Because this gas impacts the creation of clouds, the gas also plays a role in the overall climate of the planet. So, the more we know about how clouds come to be, the more we could know about the potentially cataclysmic climate changes that are starting to alter the weather and wildlife on Earth (which, um, is where we live) with devistating effects. These kinds of little details means more than they might seem at first glance — we need to look at the truth, as the poet Emily Dickenson said, slant.
And to quote the G.I. Joe cartoon I grew up watching during the Reagan ’80s, “knowing,” dear readers, “is half the battle.”
Photo c/o this real American hero.
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