Natural aerosols and climate: Understanding the unpolluted atmosphere to better understand the impacts of pollution

The amount of ice present in mixed-phase clouds, which contain both supercooled liquid water droplets and ice particles, affects cloud extent, lifetime, particle size and radiative properties. The freezing of cloud droplets can be catalysed by the presence of aerosol particles known as ice nuclei. One of the most important ice nuclei is thought to be mineral dust aerosol from arid regions. It is generally assumed that clay minerals, which contribute approximately two-thirds of the dust mass, dominate ice nucleation by mineral dust, and many experimental studies have therefore focused on these materials. Here we use an established droplet-freezing technique to show that feldspar minerals dominate ice nucleation by mineral dusts under mixed-phase cloud conditions, despite feldspar being a minor component of dust emitted from arid regions. We also find that clay minerals are relatively unimportant ice nuclei. Our results from a global aerosol model study suggest that feldspar ice nuclei are globally distributed and that feldspar particles may account for a large proportion of the ice nuclei in Earth's atmosphere that contribute to freezing at temperatures below about -15 °C.