Environmental chemistry

A soon-to-launch NASA mission is set to offer more data on North America’s air quality than researchers and public health programs have ever had available before. A new monitoring instrument hosted on a commercial satellite will offer continent-wide, hourly updates on air pollution, at about a four square mile resolution, according to the space agency and partner groups behind the project. What Is Carbon Capture? With Gizmodo’s Molly Taft | TechmodoThe Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument will…

This story by the Center for Public Integrity was published in partnership with Grist and is part of a series on soil lead contamination.Is lead lurking in the soil around you?Dangerous lead contamination continues to plague the soil of urban centers, particularly in high-traffic, older neighborhoods where particles and airborne dust from leaded gasoline and lead paint accumulated during the 20th century. Industrial areas where both historic and current lead emissions have settled in the soil are also high-risk.Decades of…

The rapidly rising number of space launches could pose a new threat to Earth’s critical ozone layer, according to a growing body of scientific research.Our ozone layer is often touted as a global environmental success story. Since the 1987 signing of the Montreal Protocol—an international treaty to protect the ozone—countries around the world have rallied to stop producing and emitting the chemical compounds that contributed to the dramatic thinning of the ozone layer above Antarctica. Despite a brief backslide in the…

This story was originally published by Grist, in collaboration with the Houston Chronicle and the Beaumont Enterprise. The project was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.The trouble began in the middle of the night. Around 2 a.m. on January 10, 2017, an air quality monitor in Port Arthur, Texas, began recording sulfur dioxide readings well above the federal standard of 75 parts per billion, or ppb. The monitor had recently been installed by regulators to keep an eye on Oxbow Calcining, a company owned by…