Millions of Tons of Extremely Reactive Chemicals Found Lingering in the Earth’s Atmosphere

California Wildfires Threaten Biodiversity

SAN DIEGO - OCTOBER 31: Winds in the upper atmosphere that stretch thin clouds over the U.S. (L) and Mexico (R) international border are a precursor to windy conditions coming to an area where the burnt remains of rare Tecate cypress trees killed in the 2003 Cypress Fire stand in the Otay Mountains October 31, 2007 southeast of San Diego, California. The survival of both the Tecate cypress tree and the rare Thorne's hairstreak butterfly whose larvae typically eats only mature Tecate cypress trees between 20 and 25 years old was threatened when huge wildfires nearly wiped out the rare trees in 2003. Some of the 2003 burn areas burned again last week, killing fire-dependant plant seeds before they had time to mature, thus disrupting the native ecosystem and increasing the growth of exotic grasses which are more flammable and less able to prevent erosion. The local Mediterranean-type ecosystem occurs in only a half dozen places throughout the world, which make up only about 2.2 percent of the Earth's land surface but are home to 20 percent of the Earth's plant species. Firefighters have had a break from the dry Santa Ana wind conditions that fueled the wildfires with gale-force winds, blackened 368,000 acres, destroyed 2,000 homes, and killed at least seven people. The Santa Ana winds are forecast to create high fire danger again this week but are expected to be much milder.
(Photo : Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

Various chemical compounds are formed in the Earth's atmosphere each year, millions for that matter. They very quickly interact with other compounds as well, helping chemists understand processes in the Earth's atmosphere.

In a new study, researchers discovered an extremely reactive chemical that they had previously thought to be too unstable to last under atmospheric conditions, LiveScience reported. Findings suggest that these chemicals called hydrotrioxides can linger in the atmosphere for several hours which could have implications for human health and climate across the globe.

Hydrotrioxides are chemical compounds that contain a hydrogen atom and three oxygen atoms, which are normally 'too unstable' to last long in the Earth's atmosphere. This is because they are thermally unstable products formed in the low-temperature ozonolysis of saturated organic compounds used in organic synthesis, according to the new research published recently online in the journal Science.

The new research shows that hydrotrioxides are indeed just a regular product of many common chemical reactions, and can stay stable enough to react with other compounds in the atmosphere.

Established in the Atmosphere 'Long Enough'

Potentially detectable steady-state concentrations of this reactive chemical have in fact been previously established in the atmosphere, "long enough for them to do stuff in the atmosphere," said Henrik Grum Kjærgaard, a chemist at the University of Copenhagen.

"We showed that the lifetime of one of them was at least 20 minutes," he noted.

Kjærgaard authored the new study on hydrotrioxide formation in the atmosphere, among other researchers.

The authors emphasized that there is actually nothing new happening in the atmosphere as it seems that hydrotrioxides have always formed there, and "they are surprisingly stable and that they are formed from almost all chemical compounds," University of Copenhagen doctoral student and second author Jing Chen, added.

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How the Compounds Might Affect Human Health and the Environment

After researchers had conducted laboratory experiments and confirmed that hydrotrioxides are formed by common chemical reactions in the atmosphere, they proceeded to investigate how and the global climate during the minutes or hours of activity before they decompose.

"From the knowledge of organic chemistry, we can expect that [hydrotrioxides] will act as an oxidant in the atmosphere," says study lead author Torsten Berndt, an atmospheric chemist at the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) in Leipzig, Germany. "It's also possible that hydrotrioxides could have an effect when our lungs breathe in air that contains them in very low concentrations, but this is all very speculative at the moment."

Nonetheless, the team were able to show that hydrotrioxides are indeed present and living long enough to be - most likely - important in the atmosphere.

According to Berndt, hydrotrioxides could also penetrate atmospheric aerosols suspended in the atmosphere such as volcanic ashes and soot from large fires. Should this happen, it is possible that the hydrotrioxides also initiate chemical reactions there, but Brendt stressed it would be "very challenging" to look into.

"Hydrotrioxides represent a previously omitted substance class in the atmosphere, the impact of which needs to be examined," the authors wrote.