Concurrent high-resolution measurements in the surface seawater and the overlying atmosphere showed that both the Arctic and the Southern Ocean were highly supersaturated in benzene and toluene, and their emission fluxes rivalled those of other atmospherically relevant marine trace gases, such as isoprene or monoterpenes. Implementing these emission fluxes in a global chemistry-climate model, we estimated that ocean-leaving benzene and toluene made significant contributions to SOA mass concentration in the polar regions, with the largest effect over the pristine Southern Ocean (7.7 % increase in SOA as the average effect, and up to 77.3 % increase using the highest measured emission flux). Even though a note of caution must be sound on the limited spatial and temporal coverage of our cruises, these results indicate that the inclusion of natural oceanic emissions of benzene and toluene in global models will help to reduce the current underestimates in naturally produced total and cloud-forming ( ) aerosols over the oceans.