AS IF we didn鈥檛 have enough to worry about with greenhouse gases messing up the climate, there鈥檚 a new potential spanner in the atmospheric works.
Tar balls form in the smoke from burning plants and are made mainly of carbon, but are up to 10 times the diameter of soot particles. No one knows what effect the newly discovered particles have on the environment or human health. They might contribute to global warming by absorbing sunlight in the atmosphere, but whether this is effect is significant compared with conventional soot is unclear. 鈥淚t would be premature to speculate,鈥� says Peter Buseck at Arizona State University in Tempe, part of the team that discovered the particles.
While soot is almost entirely made up of carbon, tar balls contain around 15 per cent oxygen, the team will report in a future issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research.
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