An Irish scientist has discovered the secret behind miserable weather - seaweed helps to make clouds. Prof Colin O'Dowd has found that vapours from the ocean produce clouds - and the breakthrough will help predict the planet's climate in the future.
The scientist headed up an elite team from Europe and America on a two-year study into how seaweed helps create dull weather. The research was carried out on low-flying aircraft around the west coast using space-age instruments to measure the tiny aerosols released by seaweed and plankton. Scientists have been trying to crack the phenomenon for about 100 years but the particles were too minuscule to analyse. The breakthrough will help weather experts around the globe predict climate changes into the next century. The professor of physics and atmospheric physics at NUI Galway co-ordinated the study from the Mace Head Atmospheric Station in Carna, Galway. He is delighted with the discovery after years of painstaking work. "Scientists have been researching this phenomenon for over 100 years," he said. "Iodine vapours are produced from seaweed and plankton. These iodine vapours react with sunlight and ozone to produce iodine oxide particles which form clouds. We needed to measure over scales of one thousand millionth of a metre. We made field measurements on the Connemara coast using a whole array of different instruments which allowed us to fingerprint iodine in these nano-particles.We used a range of techniques like electron microscopes and other specialised instruments dedicated to measuring nano-particles. Some were instruments developed by the research team.
"The final part of the puzzle was unravelled by conducting controlled experiments into the aerosol-forming ability of these iodine vapours in the California Institute of Technology 'smog-chamber'. The combined field and laboratory results proved conclusively that marine aerosol particles are produced from iodine vapours released from marine algae."
The discovery that marine algae releases an iodine gas which eventually forms clouds is a vital piece of information for experts trying to gauge the climate in the next few decades.