Earth's "Cleanest Air" Identified

An area above the Southern Ocean is unscarred by human activity.

From: Cosmos


June 4, 2020 – Cosmos, published by the Royal Institute of Australia, contains this article about aerosol research into what appears to be the cleanest and purest air in the world.

“The Southern Ocean is the place to breathe deep, it seems.

“Atmospheric scientists say they have identified a region south of 40 degrees latitude that is “truly pristine” because the boundary layer air that feeds the lower clouds is essentially free from aerosols produced by anthropogenic activities or transported from distant lands.

“The summer airborne bacterial community in this region, directly south of Australia, is dominated by marine bacteria emitted in sea spray, they say.

“The study – the first to measure the ocean’s bioaerosol composition – was led by Sonia Kreidenweis from Colorado State University in the US and used data collected on board the Australian research ship R/V Investigator.

“The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We were able to use the bacteria in the air over the Southern Ocean [SO] as a diagnostic tool to infer key properties of the lower atmosphere; for example, that the aerosols controlling the properties of SO clouds are strongly linked to ocean biological processes, and that Antarctica appears to be isolated from southward dispersal of microorganisms and nutrient deposition from southern continents,” says co-author Thomas Hill.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/earth/earth-sciences/scientists-identify-the-cleanest-air-on-earth/