The study, published in the journal Science Advances, shows that the oceans not only capture and redistribute the sun’s heat, but produce gases that make particles with immediate climatic effects, for example through the brightening of clouds that reflect this heat.

It broadens the climatic impact of marine sulfur because it adds a new compound, methanethiol, that had previously gone unnoticed. Researchers only detected the gas recently, because it used to be notoriously hard to measure and earlier work focussed on warmer oceans, whereas the polar oceans are the emission hotspots.

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Dr Wohl, of UEA’s Centre for Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences and one of the lead authors, said: "This is the climatic element with the greatest cooling capacity, but also the least understood. We knew methanethiol was coming out of the ocean, but we had no idea about how much and where. We also did not know it had such an impact on climate.

"Climate models have greatly overestimated the solar radiation actually reaching the Southern Ocean, largely because they are not capable of correctly simulating clouds. The work done here partially closes the longstanding knowledge gap between models and observations.”

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This allowed them to conclude that, annually and on a global average, methanethiol increases known marine sulfur emissions by 25%.

"It may not seem like much, but methanethiol is more efficient at oxidizing and forming aerosols than dimethyl sulfide and, therefore, its climate impact is magnified,” said co-lead Dr Julián Villamayor, a researcher at IQF-CSIC

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