Chemistry.
Biology.
Physics.
A NASA mission has gathered experts in all three disciplines...and more....
for an ambitious project to study Earth's climate.
It's called the North Atlantic Aerosols and
Marine Ecosystem Study.
NASA calls it NAAMES.
It's a complex mission with a million moving parts,
but there are three big ones to note.
First, there's the research vessel Atlantis, a laboratory at sea.
Then there's NASA's own C130 Hercules, a laboratory in the sky.
And one more...but we'll get to that. It's big hardware for sure,
but the stars of the show, besides a crackerjack team of scientists,
are these guys: ...phytoplankton.
In the north Atlantic there are trillions, and springtime is when
they bloom.
Phytoplankton produce a gas called dimethymsulfide, or DMS,
and as that gas passes into the atmosphere, it rapidly breaks down.
The resulting sulfur compounds become aerosols, microscopic particles
in essence, and water condenses around them.
And you know what you get when countless water droplets
condense in the atmosphere? Clouds.
There's a startling connection: phytoplankton affect cloud formation!
But phytoplankton growth depends on available carbon, and the warmer the
temperatures of the ocean, the less carbon that water can hold.
Less carbon could restrict phytoplankton growth, which
in turn could affect global cloud cover,
among other things.
When one part of the system changes, everything shifts, and that's why NASA
has teams out in the field, studying how that system
works from all sorts of angles.
So what's the mission's third big moving part?
That would be The Agency's fleet of spacecraft, currently in orbit
gathering global information 24-7-365.
Lessons learned from NAAMES and related research will help
experts develop the next generation
of spacecraft, some of which are already on the drawing board.
Most people know NASA for its interplanetary adventures.
But that high-flying know-how also enables it to conduct some of the
most important scientific research right here, on the planet where
you're watching this video.
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