There’s a cool new way to die in Oklahoma—toxic organic pollutant exposure!
Okay, I wouldn’t exactly call that "new." It’s probably been around for a while, or at least ever since we started spreading literal shit across our fields and crops.
In what feels like the opening scene of a twisted dystopian HBO series—where toxic plumes of organic pollutants drift lazily into towns, coating everything in an invisible layer of hazardous dust and turning residents into mindless, flesh-eating mutant zombies who migrate west to California, leaving death and destruction in their wake—researchers at the University of Colorado have discovered a rare airborne toxin in northwestern Oklahoma that's never before been documented in the Western Hemisphere.
Or something like that.
Once in a while, scientific research resembles detective work. Researchers head into the field with a hypothesis and high hopes of finding specific results, but sometimes, there’s a twist in the story that requires a deeper dive into the data.
That was the case for CU Boulder researchers who led a field campaign in an agricultural region of Oklahoma. Using a high-tech instrument to measure how aerosol particles form and grow in the atmosphere, they stumbled upon something unexpected: the first-ever airborne measurements of Medium Chain Chlorinated Paraffins (MCCPs), a type of toxic organic pollutant, in the Western Hemisphere. Their results were published today in ACS Environmental Au.
“It's very exciting as a scientist to find something unexpected like this that we weren't looking for,” said Daniel Katz, CU Boulder chemistry Ph.D. student and lead author of the study. “We're starting to learn more about this toxic, organic pollutant that we know is out there and which we need to understand better.”
Yes, that’s right. Move over, tornadoes. Take a bow, earthquakes. Step aside, floods, inland hurricanes, and mountain lions.