Way up in the sky and sprinkled across the seas, two of the littlest yet most influential things in the world have stubbornly guarded their secrets: aerosols and phytoplankton. Today, NASA launched its Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem mission, or PACE, to unravel their mysteries. The mission’s findings could be a key to understanding how drastically the world is changing as it warms.
Aerosols are little bits of dust, wildfire smoke, and fossil fuel pollution floating around the atmosphere, which both absorb and reflect the sun’s energy and help build clouds—wildly complex dynamics that climate models still struggle to account for. And phytoplankton are the
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