The smell of the ocean — that sharp, clean scent people travel thousands of kilometres to breathe — is not salt, which has no real smell, but partly dimethyl sulphide: a sulfur gas released when compounds made by microscopic marine algae are broken down by bacteria, death, and grazing in the sea.

The smell most people mean when they say “the sea” is not salt. Salt is sodium chloride, a solid that does not evaporate at ordinary temperatures, so it has no odour at all. The scent that carries up off a beach is made of gases, and one of the main ones is dimethyl sulphide. Dimethyl [...] The post The smell of the ocean — that sharp, clean scent people travel thousands of kilometres to breathe — is not salt, which has no real smell, but partly dimethyl sulphide: a sulfur gas released when comp