This is after a storm, right? The idea has always been, the rain is cleaning.

Mary Gellis, a chemist at Lawrence Berkeley Lab.

She and her colleagues study microscopic airborne particles.

So,

Normally, we don't collect during rain because our intuition is the air is clean.

Why would be collecting right now?

Two years ago they went against that intuition and collected after a rainstorm at a field in northern Oklahoma.

And what they found was actually a wealth of particles, about half a micron in diameter, nearly spherical, and glassy looking under the microscope.

Lab analysis revealed the miniscule bits to be carbon-based blobs of soil material,

like decayed bits of plants and soil dwellers. But how they got airborne was a mystery. The

researchers think that what's happening based on a follow-up experiment goes

something like this. The rain leads to puddles. Organic matter leeches into those puddles forming a film on top of the water.

Then as raindrops strike, they form tiny air bubbles.

Those bubbles rise to the surface and burst through that layer of organic material

catapulting the soil particles into the air. The studies in the journal Nature

Geoscience. Tiny as they may be the particles may actually affect the climate.

We think that they have the potential to actually be absorbing incoming solar radiation,

and then that feeds back into global climate change.

Meaning we might want to factor them into climate models

because they appear to be more than just dust in the wind.

Thanks for the minute.

For Scientific Americans 60 Second Science, I'm Christopher and Dahlia.

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