Russia
Arctic haze decline may be tied to less Russian smelting
(Ned Rozell/Alaska Science, Anchorage Daily News, 19 December 2009) -- Arctic haze, a blob of dirty air that fuzzes up Alaska views in springtime, seems to be losing its punch. By comparing air measurements in Barrow from the 1970s to 2008, scientists have found that pollution particles from factories in Russia and Eurasia have become fewer and fewer in the last 30 years. "The Arctic haze is disappearing," said Glenn Shaw, who did pioneering research on the phenomenon and is the co-author on a recent paper about its decrease. "We don't know why." Shaw, a professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute, has in years past stopped passersby to point out how Arctic haze—pollution particles in the air that scatter light—has "obliterated" views of the Alaska Range in springtime. In recent years, he has noticed that the vistas have been much clearer from Fairbanks, and instrumentation in Barrow seems to back that up. "There's less of the industrial signal, of what's typically been known as Arctic haze," said Patricia Quinn, a research chemist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle and the lead author of the study, which appeared in the Nov. 23 issue of the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. First named by an Air Force pilot in the 1950s, Arctic haze appears in the north from about January until early May, when a more active atmosphere flushes and dilutes what Shaw once called an Africa-size amoeba of dirty air that sloshes over the top of the globe. The decrease in that sort of pollution may be due to less smelting of heavy metals in Russia and improved emission technology. "I personally think they're pumping less junk into the atmosphere," Shaw said. "Things have changed."
Posted 20 December 2009; 6:59:17 PM. Permalink
Tagged: Circumpolar News, Contaminants and Pollution, December09, Russia
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