Here’s a story that I wrote for Oceanus, the magazine of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution:
For generations of mariners, a tangy, almost sweet odor served as a signal that land was nearby. 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.
Part of what they’re all smelling is a little-studied gas known as dimethylsulfide, or DMS. 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.
DMS does far more than ring the birds’ dinner bell, though. Scientists believe it represents a large source of sulfur going into the Earth’s atmosphere. 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.
There’s also a sidebar: For Graduate Student, Research is a Gas
