What do our skies look like before fossil fuel started burning? Or how clouds form? Or How clouds help set the temperature of the earth? The answers to these questions are unknown until a recent study was published online.

On July 17, a recent study helmed by the University of Washington and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory was published in Science Advances, an open-access Science journal. The research revealed how tiny natural particles given off by marine organisms, nearly doubled cloud droplets numbers in the summer, according to Phys.org.

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By combining computer modelling and satellite data over the Southern Ocean, the study estimated how much solar energy equates to the vast sea surrounding Antarctica.

"It is a strong effect," Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory climate scientist Susannah Burrows said. "But it makes sense because most of the area down there is ocean, with strong winds that kick up a lot of spray and lots of marine microorganisms producing these particles. And continental aerosol sources are mostly so far away that they only have a limited impact. Really the marine aerosols are running the show there."

Based on the study, phytoplankton, which is the tiny organisms in the sea that produces airborne gases and organic matter to seed cloud droplets, lead to brighter clouds that reflect more sunlight, University of Washington Today reported.

"The clouds over the Southern Ocean reflect significantly more sunlight in the summertime than they would without these huge plankton blooms," co-lead author Daniel McCoy, a UW doctoral student in atmospheric sciences, stated. "In the summer, we get about double the concentration of cloud droplets as we would if it were a biologically dead ocean."

Furthermore, the clouds form when droplets of water condense out of the air around tiny particles and it turns out that the particle size creates a direct impact on cloud brightness. Smaller particles form small droplets creating more surface area which reflect back incoming sunlight, which in turn help keeps the Earth's surface cooler, Gizmodo noted.

Burrows and co-author Daniel McCoy at the University of Washington worked with other colleagues from the University of Leeds. The research was funded by NASA, the U.S Department of Energy and a graduate fellowship from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Other co-authors of this study are Pro-Lun Ma and Phil Rasch at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Scott Elliott at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

TagsPlankton, Marine Plankton, Study, Science