Wildfire smoke - now extra toxic plumes from sun UV
Did you know just one of the many fires burning in Quebec is the size of an entire Canadian province (PEI), or large enough to stretch between the cities of Ottawa and Montreal or Toronto to Niagara Falls? Read on to learn more about why the smoke now smells like plastic and the health impact. 🧵 1/
You can read the unrolled one page version here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1675174138741178371.html
You can see from this fire smoke map that tiny PM2.5 aerosols don't just drop 6 feet away but can travel all over the continent with the smoke from northern Quebec blanketing New York City and even producing hazy skies in Europe ( https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/ ). 2/
Instead of the classic smell of burning wood in a fireplace or campfire, things are starting to smell more like burned plastic so what is going on? It turns out that when smoke stays in the air for prolonged periods of time, the UV radiation from the sun interacts with all the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) to form even more toxic gases. 3/
I used to live in Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand where the annual "burning season" (during which farmers in that part of Thailand and in Laos and Burma burn off grass, rice stubble and weeds in their fields prior to planting crops) results in some of the worse smoke pollution anywhere in the world for several weeks each year. I can vouch for the fact that the smog resulting from stubble burning is nothing like bonfire smoke; in fact it's extremely acrid and really hurts your throat and lungs.
It used to give me mild bronchospasm - unfortunately it coincides with the hottest time of the year up there with temperatures of 40+°C, which doesn't help!
@Paulos_the_fog I know someone who lives there now and they were telling me about the burning season, I think they said the PM2.5 was over 1000 ug/m^3 which is brutal!
Yes the first hot/burning season I spent there was absolutely BRUTAL!
Doi Sutep, the mountain at the back of Chiang Mai was almost completely ablaze as careless farmers had let their fires spread out of control (possibly deliberately) and the temperature, according to the local air quality monitoring station reached 47°C (the govt would never let a figure like that be published for fear of discouraging tourists. Officially the record is 41°C)
The air quality was an absolute horror story but the at that time there was not PM2.5 monitoring only PM10 but that was bad enough! I dread to think what the PM2.5 would have been that year and even locals were dying of heatstroke!
The most popular water over there is osmotically filtered as it's very cheap. Unfortunately OF water contains no dissolved salts at all so if you are sweating a lot, it's one of the worst things you can drink. In order to sweat and generate pee, your body needs sodium, potassium and other disolved salts and if the water you drink doesn't contain any they will get pulled out of your bloodstream by the kidneys and eventually the electrolyte imbalance or deficiency that that process engenders causes you to have a heart attack and die!
