As Norwegian Ensayista Randi Nygård did research for The Gift of Scent, she was looking into scents relating to peatlands in Norway, and she came across an article about cloud formation from the scientific centre CERN. There the scientists had studied biogenic materials’ role in forming clouds, and found that one of the molecules that we recognize as the scent of pine forests, alpha-pinene, can be a vital ingredient in the first steps of vapor travelling in the air.
So she and collaborato Simon D. T. Wenzel produced a new scent, called “The Scent of Pine Can Create Rain”. The scent contains geosmin which is the scent of wet soil, molecules smelling like wet grass, and ozone scents, like the ones in the air just before rain fall. It was part of Nygårds show, with the same name, “The Scent of Pine Can Create Rain”, at Leveld Kunstnartun in Norway, taking place in an old barn at a bog from June to October 2023.
The science program at CERN is part of the global effort of building large climate models. To Nygård, the concrete meeting with the invisible molecule in the forest, with the scent, in our noses, is made even more poetic as the knowledge of its role in seeding clouds is added to the sense of smelling. What comes into our nostrils can later travel far up in the air and help hold a cloud together.
