We often refer to Earth as the Blue Marble.
But the ocean isn't just blue.
Tiny plants and algae called phytoplankton have a number of pigments inside of them
that they use for photosynthesis,
and which is the process of taking carbon dioxide and creating cellular material.
Just like land plants do.
And if you have enough phytoplankton in the water,
you'll start seeing green swirls.
Current missions only measure one green.
The advance of PACE is.
It measures all of the greens.
And this doesn't sound like much, but that information, where you can see
all of the different shades of green, allow scientists like myself
to actually tell you what phytoplankton community is there.
And you care about this because not every community is the same.
Some are beneficial.
They provide food and oxygen.
Others close beaches.
So we really want to know where they are and when they appear and the impact
of all of this.
Pace was launched less
than three months ago and it's already teaching us things about our home planet.
It's a mission that's exciting because pace makes the invisible visible.
It's flying hundreds of miles above Earth, and yet it's designed
to see microscopic things in the ocean their phytoplankton,
tiny plants and algae that form the base of the marine food chain, the atmosphere,
the aerosols, things like dust, sea salt, pollen, volcanic ash.
And it's doing so every single day.
Pace has specialized instruments
that can describe what's blowing around in our atmosphere.
And when I say blowing around, I'm talking about these tiny particles
like smoke, wildfires, pollen,
sea spray dust, all of those things.
And you care about this because they inform on air quality.
You know, you don't want to be breathing all of these things.
And so it's really nice to have eyes in the sky telling you
what you're actually breathing.
And then there are also these amazing interactions here.
Aerosols enter interact with phytoplankton.
Believe it or not.
And phytoplankton can actually create clouds
and aerosols and clouds of course interact.
And all of these interactions really describe
how our home planet is responding to a change in climate.
No matter where any of us live,
we're more than likely experienced some kind of extreme event recently.
Whether it's been a drought, a wildfire,
heavy storms, heavy snowfall, things like that.
This is a result of our changing climate and the beauty of pace
and the fact that it's a complete Earth science mission by studying land,
oceans and atmospheres is this really provides another
great tool in our toolbox to understand the impacts of all of these
and even use the information from Pace to put it into these really elegant models
that can help predict or better understand why these events are occurring.