Chasing the Inversion

For the last week I have been thinking of ideas for my Chasing the Inversion photo blog. Even being a day student and spending time away from campus every day I was struggling with a circumstance to photograph. With the option to attend polar swim on Friday Feb. 12th not being available, I started to explore other options.

My inability to capture a moment of Inversion I resorted to my past summer when I spent time skiing in Chile. While the ski trip was one of the most amazing opportunities I have ever been a part of, it was also one of the most eye opening.

The ski resort, El Colorado

When walking through the Santiago airport in Chile, I could see through the large bay windows, the poor and depressed city. Through the large sliding glass doors we were abruptly hit with a thick layer of what looked to me to be fog or smoke. Come to find out it was smog.

For the last week or so in my D block APES class we have been discussing Air pollution and have been focused on the differences in smog. There are two major types of smog,  Brown and Gray Smog. By researching a little bit about Santiago as a city I have learned that the smog I was experiencing was Brown Smog, also known as photochemical smog.

This picture you can see in the upper right corner the smog covering the city of Santiago Chile.

This Picture above shows the Photochemical Smog that is covering the city of Santiago. Photochemical Smog is mainly produced by vehicle use and combustion in urban areas. This smog is produced when sunlight drives a series of reactions involving primary pollutants. Due to the sunlight Photochemical Smog regularly peaks in the afternoon, after both rush hour and a long day of sunshine.

Mountains surrounding the city of Santiago

As the pictures show the city is surrounded by large mountains which help trap in the smog. The way thermal inversion works is, warm air sits above the cold air on the ground. The warm air contains and pushes the pollution down below the layer of warmth. This creates smog. In a sense, the pollutants become trapped with no way out above the clouds and continue to build until the weather changes. Because of the mountains surrounding the city, it adds another constraint to the pollution from the sides. Not only can the smog go up, but it can't even go sideways.


As the trip was fun and I got to do what I loved, skiing, I realized how different rural New Hampshire is from a dirty, poor and depressed urban city like Santiago. So what can I do? More importantly, what can we do? As the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets standards for emissions nation wide, we can still help out and do our part by reducing our car use by car pooling and riding bikes, and continue to find cleaner ways to supply us with power and run our factories.

DO YOUR PART, REDUSE YOUR EMISSIONS. 

I CHALLENGE YOU, WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Help preserve this precious earth.


All Photos taken by Eric Bonewald