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“DMS just isn’t fashionable, but I think it could have a hugely important role to play-more important than a lot of things that are fashionable right now.”ĭacey has long investigated the processes that control how environmentally important gases are exchanged between Earth, ocean, organisms, and the atmosphere. “Environmentally, understanding DMS is incredibly important,” said Dierdre Toole, a marine chemist at WHOI. He says he’s amazed and dismayed that carbon dioxide receives so much research funding right now at the expense of other basic science, when other gases may have critical roles to play in countering or augmenting warming. John Dacey, a biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), is one of the few marine scientists who have devoted a great deal of time to studying oceanic DMS over the past few decades. Despite its potential impact on climate, the amount of attention focused on DMS remains relatively small, and scientists continue to be uncertain whether it can make a major difference in global climate change. By encouraging cloud formation, Lovelock theorized, DMS might help keep the Earth’s thermostat at a fairly constant temperature.īut scientists still understand very little about how and why marine algae make DMS, how it moves through the food web in the upper ocean, or how much of it gets into the lower atmosphere. Lovelock is famed as the originator of the Gaia hypothesis, which suggests that the Earth functions as a single living organism and maintains the conditions necessary for its own survival. In 1987, British chemist James Lovelock and several colleagues popularized an idea first proposed by others that algae might play a vital role in regulating the Earth’s climate.
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That hopeful claim has been made for more than two decades. That means DMS could help offset greenhouse warming. If DMS production is speeded up by global climate change, as many scientists believe it will be, then it could provide a cooling effect. As such, it helps drive the formation of clouds, which block solar radiation from reaching the Earth’s surface and reflect it back into space. Scientists believe it represents a large source of sulfur going into the Earth’s atmosphere. (See Seabirds Use Their Sense of Smell to Find Food.)ĭMS does far more than ring the birds’ dinner bell, though. Some seabirds, possessing a keen olfactory sense, use the scent to track down its source: blooms of algae floating near the ocean’s surface, where the microscopic animals, krill, and other crustaceans that gather to graze on algae provide the birds with a hearty meal.
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Part of what they’re all smelling is a little-studied gas known as dimethylsulfide, or DMS.
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What sailors called “the smell of the shore” had the opposite meaning to landlubbers, who would catch the same sweet scent wafting over the waves and think of it as “the smell of the sea.” Seabirds probably don’t have a name for it, but the odor means something to them, as well: the opening of an all-you-can-eat buffet. For generations of mariners, a tangy, almost sweet odor served as a signal that land was nearby.