Interesting History of Arctic Haze
19.03.2008 - Other
A team composed of Tim Garrett, assistant professor of meteorology at the University of Utah, and Lisa Verzella, a former undergraduate student, have found tangible evidence the existence of an Arctic haze as early as 1870.
With humans generating aerosol emissions since sometime just after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Garrett had reason to believe that the pollution coming from the smelting and coal mine activities in Europe, Asia and North America could already have caused an Arctic haze as early as the late 1700s.
Searching through historic records left behind by Arctic explorers, the two scientists fell upon a description of this "dry haze" which had settled upon the ice and formed a layer of greyish dust containing metallic composites.
"Recent Greenland ice cores show a rapid rise in anthropogenic soot and sulphate that began in the late 1800s, but with peak sulphate levels in the 1970s, and peak soot between 1906 and 1910," say Garrett and Verzella in their study published in the March 2008 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. While high sulphate composition is a sign of oil combustion, high soot composition is characteristic of coal combustion. Garrett's and Verzella's conclusions thus seem consistent with the sources of pollution prevailing during the 19th and 20th century.
