Scientists and researchers affirm that they identified the world’s cleanest air in the area over the Southern Ocean in Antarctica. Professor Sonia Kreidenweis and her team from Colorado State University believe that the air on the Southern Ocean would be least affected by human activity and dust from the continents of the world. They also found out that the boundary layer air, which fuels the clouds off the Southern Ocean, was free from aerosol particles created by human activity- burning fossil fuels, growing crops, fertilizer production and wastewater disposal. The World Health Organization (WHO) announced air pollution as a global health crisis, affecting millions of people each year due to aerosols that are cascading in the air.

The researchers investigated the air components and the origin of it using the bacteria as a diagnostic tool to measure and analyze the lower atmosphere’s properties. “The aerosols controlling the properties of Southern Ocean 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”, Thomas Hill, research scientist and co-author of the study, said. They also explored the composition of airborne microbes and examined the air in the marine boundary level, traveling to the south Antarctic ice edge from Tasmania, Australia. Aerosols from distant landmasses and human activities were not going south and into the air, resulting in an obvious dissimilarity to all other studies from oceans both in the northern hemisphere and subtropics.