Southern defense

"Chemical equator" discovered in Earth's atmosphere

It has long been known that asthmatics suffering from dirty urban air should move to the Southern Hemisphere. The air here is cleaner - primarily because most of the industry that emits carbon oxides, sulfur compounds, heavy metals and other poisons into the atmosphere is concentrated in Europe, North America and East Asia. There is much less land south of the equator than in the Northern Hemisphere, and not many chimneys have been built yet in Australia, South America and South Africa. British chemists have confirmed that the atmosphere of the Earth's hemispheres is radically different in air purity, having discovered a "chemical equator" between the islands of Indonesia and the Australian mainland.

The geographic equator, as you know, is an imaginary line, but the chemical equator is quite real. According to specialists from the Department of Chemistry at the University of York, in the western part of the Pacific Ocean, a zone 50 km wide stretches from west to east, separating the polluted air of the north from the clean atmosphere of the south. According to research, the difference between air masses is quite significant: for example, the carbon monoxide content north of this equator is 160 parts per billion, in the “southern chemical hemisphere” it is only 40. In order to determine the location of the pollution boundary, scientists used an equipped sensors on an aircraft cruising along the equatorial zones of the Pacific and Indian oceans.

From a meteorological point of view, something similar should have formed in this area. Here the trade winds of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres collide, blowing almost towards each other. After the collision, the air masses rise up and travel in the opposite direction - from the equator to the tropics. However, according to the British, the “chemical equator” is not located exactly where the winds meet: it is shifted slightly north of the meteorological barrier.

The location of the conventional line dividing north and south roughly coincides with the border between Asia and Australia. On a map provided by British researchers in the winter of 2006, the chemical equator stretched south of Indonesia, bisected the Timor and Arafat Seas, passed north of Australia's Darwin, crossed the Cape York Peninsula in the northeast of the Green Continent and then southeast through the Coral Sea to the region New Hebrides and New Caledonia.

The reason for the deviation of the “chemical equator” from the meteorological line of collision of trade winds is considered to be powerful cyclones forming off the northern coasts of Australia. The waters of the seas and oceans here are heated to maximum temperatures, notes Jacqueline Hamilton from the University of York. As a result, strong atmospheric vortices are formed, which act like pumps, drawing in polluted air and raising it to a considerable height, where industrial emissions can remain for a long time.

Vladimir DZAGUTO