Your Nose is Invited to A Party
We’ve got our noses in the air out here in the desert. Not because we are feeling superior, but we are sniffing for any hint of rain.
Our noses will be the first to tell us.
The word petrichor—the smell after a rain—was conceived by two scientists in 1964: Isabel Joy Bear and R.G. Thomas. They put together two Greek words: Petra, meaning stone, and ichor, the substance that flows in the veins of gods.
Scientists knew petrichor occurred when a scent was released when moisture combined with organisms found in the soil, but the details remained a mystery. That is, until MIT scientists captured slow-motion images of falling water drops.
According to an article in Journal How, “The videos revealed that raindrops trap air bubbles. When they hit the ground, the bubbles capture small molecules from the soil. These molecules bubble up and release aerosols, not unlike the bubbles in a glass of champagne.”
Bursting, scented air molecules.
God knows how to throw a party.
And the first attendee is our nose.
One organic compound we detect is geosmin, from the Greek “earth smell.” According to the Journal How, “Our noses can detect geosmin at less than ten parts per trillion concentrations. That’s around a teaspoonful in two hundred Olympic size swimming pools.”
The drier it is, the stronger the smell.
In the drought-starved places of our lives, God provides a scent of hope.
As we enter July, all of us in Arizona remember last year when we broke all kinds of records for consecutive hot days—not the type of records you want to be breaking! We went 31 consecutive days of 110 degrees or hotter! (Smashing a 19-day record from 1974.) And Phoenix went 147 days without rain (from March 22 to Aug 17).
We have moved to Stage 2 Fire Restrictions in the northern forests of Arizona (at the time of this writing), so we are not just wishing for the smell for rain but praying for the needed moisture for sustained life.
Rain will usher in our second spring. A second bloom of wildflowers. The arrival of butterflies. A second breeding season.
So yes, we have our noses in the air. And our eyes.
We watch for desert rain.
A poem I wrote last summer:
