Despite its romantic and mysterious halo, which was so well in the Sherlock Holmes stories , the fog that existed in London in the 19th century was the result of the terrible pollution thrown by the Industrial Revolution, the epicenter of that revolution.
The mix of cold, dense fog, lack of wind and toxic smoke generated by burning poor quality coal littered the lungs of thousands of people , but not only in London. Remains of this contamination have been detected at more than 10,000 kilometers .
Himalayas
A new study published in PNAS shows that the by-products of coal burning in Europe in the late 18th century reached the Dasuopu Glacier in the central Himalayas, some 10,300 kilometers from London. Dasuopu, at 7,200 meters above sea level, is the highest point in the world where scientists have obtained a climate record of an ice core.
The ice the researchers evaluated formed between 1499 and 1992, the team determined. As Paolo Gabrielli , lead author of the study and principal investigator and research scientist at the Byrd Center for Polar and Climate Research at Ohio State University explains :
The industrial revolution was a revolution in the use of energy. And so the use of coal combustion also began to cause emissions that we believe were carried by the winds up to the Himalayas.
Their analysis confirmed this as the team found higher-than-natural levels of a number of toxic metals, including cadmium, chromium, nickel, and zinc, in ice starting around 1780.
Those metals are all by-products of burning coal, a key part of industry in the late 18th century and during the 19th and 20th centuries . The researchers found that those metals were likely carried by winter winds, which travel around the world from west to east.