Latest news with #sulfurDioxide
Daily Mail
03-06-2025
- Climate
- Daily Mail
Deadly toxic aftermath of Mt. Etna eruption that sent tourists running for their lives
Mount Etna's eruption on Monday morning likely expelled tens of thousands of tons of sulfur dioxide gas, according to experts from Italy 's volcano monitoring body. If high concentrations of sulfur dioxide are inhaled for several minutes, humans can experience burning in the nose and throat, breathing difficulties and death. This brings a whole new context to the dozens of tourists who fled for their lives as Europe's most active volcano spewed a column of ash that quickly billowed miles high. Salvatore Giammanco, a geophysicist at Italy's National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), said the level of sulfur dioxide released by Mount Etna during an eruption can reach 20,000 tons in a day. 'The summit typically releases between 2,000 and 3,000 tons of sulfur dioxide gas per day,' he said in 2010. 'Before an eruption it can reach 20,000 tons per day.' This latest eruption was the strongest since February 2021, according to INGV's Etna Observatory director Stefano Branca. 'Since February 2021, such intense volcanic activity hasn't been recorded,' he told Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera. The eruption was caused by part of Etna's southeast crater collapsing, causing a 'pyroclastic flow,' a fast-moving mass of hot ash, lava and hot gas. Pyroclastic flow can travel down a mountain at speeds from 60 miles per hour to more than 200 miles per hour, which makes running away impossible if you are too close at the time of eruption. After Mount Pelée on the island of Martinique erupted in 1902, the following pyroclastic flows destroyed the city of St. Pierre and killed 30,000 people. Some 40 tourists were in the vicinity of Mount Etna when it erupted, according to CNN. Luckily, no one was injured as a result of the eruption. One of the tourists exclusively spoke to about her experience. Jamie Boone, from Washington DC, said the volcano had been 'active all morning', but nobody had any idea it was set to erupt so violently. Footage Boone shared to social media showed a huge plume of smoke filled the skies after the eruption. She was seen running with her fellow hikers as the volcano exploded and an avalanche of boiling rock was sent hurtling down the side of the mountain. 'That was when it got a little scary and we weren't sure how much danger we were in,' she said, describing the eruption as 'loud and explosive.' 'That's when our guide told us to run to get away,' she added. 'We were glad to have an experienced guide telling the others what to do, as some were going toward it. 'We were mid-mountain and that was scary, I can't imagine how it felt being at the top right by the crater. Our guide told us if it had collapsed outward instead of inward, we and a lot of others would have been in real trouble.' Other tourists didn't have as much urgency and were seen photographing the billowing smoke. The tourism company that had customers on Mount Etna at the time of the eruption told The Independent that tours have already restarted. Go Etna said that while tours are open to the public, guides cannot go up to Mount Etna's summit nor can they go any further than 2,900 meters up the mountain. At present, there is 'no danger for the population' of Sicily, according to the president of the Sicilian Region, Renato Schifani.
CTV News
22-05-2025
- Health
- CTV News
New Brunswick's air quality meets standards: provincial report
The New Brunswick government says a new report shows the province's air quality meets standards. The report, which monitored air quality in the year 2023, detected 10 exceedances of the provincial standards for contaminants. The province says the instances were corrected by the industry that caused them, or simply through changing weather conditions. Environment and Climate Change Minister Gilles LePage says air quality has improved over the years in the province. Annual reports date back to 1996. 'New Brunswickers have made it clear that clean air is important to them, and this has shaped my mandate as minister. I look forward to meeting with the public and stakeholders later this year to discuss how we can make further improvements,' he said in a provincial news release. The full report is available on the province's website. It says while overall air quality is good, challenges remain achieving Canadian Ambient Air Quality Standards for sulfur dioxide in some areas. The Department of Environment and Local Government says it is committed to working towards improvements. An online air quality data portal is available on its website with real-time local air quality information. For more New Brunswick news, visit our dedicated provincial page.
Forbes
20-05-2025
- Science
- Forbes
How Venus-Like Exo-Planets Can Help Map Nearby Habitable Zones
Surface of Venus. Hot lava flows on Venus. 3d illustration The old adage that it's easier to prove a negative could play a crucial role in characterizing nearby exoplanets that could harbor life. The idea is that looking for earth-like planets is tough enough without wasting time on false positives. Yet the authors of a recent paper appearing in the journal Science Advances propose using the detection of sulfur dioxide in the atmospheres of extrasolar Venus-like planetary hellholes to serve as a negative chemical marker for water and life as we know it. It's really difficult to look at the exoplanet population and identify habitable planets that have liquid surface water, Sean Jordan, the paper's lead author and a planetary scientist at ETH Zurich, tells me at the recent European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2025 in Vienna. But if you can identify sulfur dioxide in their atmospheres, that is a negative sign for water, says Jordan. That's a telltale sign that that, at least for now these planets don't have liquid water and are not going to be a great place to look for life, he says. We show that the inner edge of the habitable zone can now be mapped among exoplanets using their lack of surface water, which, unlike the presence of water, can be unambiguously revealed by atmospheric sulfur, the authors write. For instance, sulfur dioxide is abundant in our own Venus's atmosphere compared to Earth but the authors note is expected to be scrubbed from habitable planetary atmospheres by precipitation. These types of searches would also enable planetary astrophysicists to finally define the inner edge of habitable zones around dozens of nearby M-dwarf spectral type stars. Such stars range in size from about a tenth to a half the mass of our own G-type star. And, perhaps most importantly for astrobiology, have exceedingly long lifetimes on the so-called main sequence, as hydrogen burning stars. Not only are red dwarf stars the most common stars and planetary systems in the galaxy, but they are geometrically favorable because they're smaller, so we get higher planet to star size ratios, says Jordan. This gives us a bigger signal when these planets transit in front of their parent stars, he says. Until now, a key challenge has been defining a given solar system's so-called habitable zone, the most simplistic definition of which is where a given terrestrial planet can harbor liquid water on its surface. Whether planets orbiting these M dwarf stars can even hold on to atmospheres at all remains an open question, says Jordan. That's because they're being blasted with so much extreme ultraviolet and X ray radiation, he says. In truth, given its size and mass, our planet Venus is virtually an astrophysical twin to our own Earth. But that's where most of the comparisons end, since Venus' surface is hot enough to melt lead and its atmospheric pressures are more than 90 times that of our own. Yet as is oft repeated, if we can't understand the planet next door, what hope do we have of understanding the thousands of new extrasolar planetary systems that have been discovered by astronomers in the last three decades? Estimates of the inner edge of the habitable zone depend heavily on modeling assumptions and whether or not a planet has evolved from a 'hot start' or a 'cold start,' the authors note. Models of slowly rotating planets initialized with surface water oceans (a cold start) can maintain habitable conditions well inside the traditional Venus zone of a star via a cloud-climate feedback, they write. With NASA's Webb Space Telescope, the critical next step in testing the origin and prevalence of life on nearby exoplanets lies in mapping the inner edges of habitable zones around M-dwarf host stars, the authors note. Positively identifying a Venus-like atmosphere, with a surface too hot to support liquid water, is imperative in constraining habitability among the rocky exoplanet population, they write. We can't say yet with any certainty whether Venus was born dead, and water only ever existed as steam in a really hot atmosphere that was eventually lost, or whether it was habitable, says Jordan. But the question of whether our Venus could have ever been habitable in the past will have sweeping implications for the possible habitability of Venus-like exoplanets, he says. As for Earth? We're very fortunate to have a planet where all of these stabilizing climate feedbacks are occurring, but we don't know how prevalent that is in the universe, says Jordan.
E&E News
17-05-2025
- Business
- E&E News
Texas court reverses itself in power plant case
Federal judges have ordered EPA to revisit its decision to flunk the area around a high-polluting east Texas power plant for compliance with a key Clean Air Act standard. EPA 'seems to have forced a result on sparse and suspect evidence' in deeming parts of two counties surrounding the Martin Lake plant to be in nonattainment for its 2010 ambient air quality standard for sulfur dioxide, according to the opinion released Friday by a three-judge panel on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The ruling reverses the panel's split decision early last year in favor of EPA. Luminant, the Martin Lake facility's owner, and the state of Texas, then sought a rehearing. Advertisement Friday's opinion, written by Judge Leslie Southwick, repeatedly cited the Supreme Court's 2024 ruling in Loper Bright v. Raimondo that curbed judicial deference to agency decision-making.
Reuters
08-05-2025
- Business
- Reuters
Marathon refinery in Carson, California, reports flaring due to process upset
NEW YORK, May 8 (Reuters) - Marathon Petroleum (MPC.N), opens new tab on Thursday reported flaring at its 365,000-barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery in Carson, California, according to a regulatory filing on Thursday. The flaring event was due to a process upset, the Governor's Office Emergency Services filing said. It released more than 500 pounds of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. A Marathon spokesperson declined to comment on refining operations beyond the filing.
