European and American scientists discovered for the first time in the Earth’s atmosphere a completely new class of highly active substances, of hydroxides. These are oxidizing chemicals that probably affect both human health and the global climate, therefore they need to be further investigated. Their concentration in the atmosphere is estimated at approx 10 million per cubic centimeter of air.
Trioxide (ROOOH), which has three oxygen atoms and one hydrogen atom, is more active than peroxides (ROOH) which have two oxygen atoms and were discovered years ago in the atmosphere. When chemicals are oxidized in the atmosphere, they often react with free hydroxyl (OH) radicals to form a new radical. When this radical reacts with oxygen, it forms a third radical called peroxide. When the peroxide reacts with another hydroxyl radical, then hydroxides are produced.
Hydrogen trioxide is unexpectedly stable and is formed during the atmospheric decomposition of several other known and widely emitted substances, in particular hydrocarbons such as isoprene. It is estimated that about 1% of all emissions of the latter are converted to hydroxides and each year 10 million metric tons of hydroxides are formed in the earth’s atmosphere by the oxidation of isoprene alone. The shelf life of hydroxides ranges from a few minutes to a few hours, long enough to react with many other substances in the atmosphere.
Researchers from the Department of Chemistry at the Danish University of Copenhagen, the German Leibniz Institute for Troposphere Research and the American Institute of Technology (Caltech) in California, led by Danish Professor Hendrik Groom Kiergaard, made the relevant publication in the journal “Science”. As Kiergaard stated, “Because they are highly oxidizing, hydrogen trioxide probably has a number of effects that we have not yet discovered.”.
Researchers suspect that trioxide can penetrate tiny airborne particles, known as aerosols, and so on. potentially inhaled and lead to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, although further research will be needed on their potential health effects. Also, given that sunlight is reflected and absorbed by aerosols, there is a high probability that hydrogen trioxide indirectly plays a role in how many aerosols and clouds are produced, so they also affect the climate of our planet.
«These substances have always been around us, we just did not know it. “We can react like this, if in the process they prove to be dangerous,” Kiergaard said. “The discovery shows that there are still many things in the air that we do not know about. Indeed, the air around us is a huge patchwork of complex chemical reactions.“, write down the researcher Jing Chen.
The lower atmosphere is a large chemical reactor where hundreds of millions of metric tons of hydrocarbons are converted each year, creating, among other things, carbon dioxide and water. These hydrocarbons are emitted from anthropogenic sources or forests. While various oxidation processes take place in air, only a few are well understood, as evidenced by the delayed detection of hydroxides.
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