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A deadly soup

RARELY does a city suffer from just a few air pollutants. Most, like this symbolic U.S. metropolis (below), generate a complex brew. Some chemicals (black labels) are emitted directly from identifiable sources. Others (red labels) are formed indirectly through photochemical reactions in the air. A glossary of major pollutants follows.


 


 Fear of fallout from Chernobyl caused Warsaw citizens to post this playground off-limits. The city is only 400 miles from the Soviet power plant where a nuclear reactor exploded on April 26, 1986, but Polish officials were not told of the accident for more than two days. By then a radioactive cloud had drifted over Poland, Finland, and Sweden. Restrictions were later put on water, milk, meat, and vegetables in 25 countries.

Perhaps the most controversial environmental issue of the decade is acid rain, but that too is clouded in mystery. Anne LaBastille wrote "Acid Rain-How Great a Menace?" for the Nov1981 GEOGRAPHIC.
"We are in the infancy of understanding the full effects on an atmosphere acidified by burning fossil fuels," Dr. Chris Bernabo, an air-qualityexpert, told me. "In order to really understand it, we must conduct years of research."

The federal Clean Air Act of 1970, amended in 1977, expired in 1981. As of this writing it continues on extensions, outdistanced by the growing knowledge about air pollution.
We live on a forgiving planet, with mechanisms to deal with natural pollutants. Decay, sea spray, and volcanic eruptions annually release more sulfur than all the power plants, smelters, and other industries in the world. Lightning bolts create nitrogen oxides just as automobiles and industrial furnaces do, and trees emit hydrocarbons called terpenes. Their release triggers a bluish haze that gave the Blue Ridge its name.

For millions of years the ingredients of such substances have been cycling through the ecosystem, constantly changing form. They pass through plant and animal tissues, sink into the sea, return to the earth, and are vaulted aloft in some geologic event to begin the cycle again. An atom of oxygen completes the cycle approximately once every 2,000 years. A portion of the next breath you take could have last been breathed by Jesus.


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