Evidence Relating Aerosolized Coal Fly Ash and Global Wildfire Increases to Stratospheric Ozone Loss

Abstract

Nearly four decades of effort have failed to halt the problem of stratospheric ozone depletion, suggesting the possibility that the underlying cause of this depletion was misdiagnosed. Beginning in 2022, we proposed that aerosolized coal fly ash is an ice-nucleating and ozone-reactive particulate and serves as an alternative source and activation platform for chlorine, bromine and iodine. Coal fly ash is known to be able to destroy ozone by various other means. Recently, we showed that elemental analyses of coal fly ash are wholly consistent with arrayed and published stratospheric particle data which we have now extended to include global wildfire data. Global wildfire ash differs from ash produced in the laboratory from burning wood in that wildfire ash incorporates an iron-rich component. We demonstrate that both elemental-composition and water-leach data from coal fly ash and wildfire data-sets are consistent. For nearly 30 years, particulate matter consistent with coal fly ash has been jet-emplaced into the global upper troposphere and lower stratosphere and then settles to ground. In 2018, we explained how aerosolized coal fly ash widely deposited over land “sets the stage” for increasingly even more deadly forest fires. Wildfires are able to remobilize the fly ash particles deposited on trees and the underlying soil and vegetation. The wildfire ash components cool, attract, and adhere to one another from within this common ash-reservoir. Coal fly ash remobilized and incorporated into wildfire smoke can be uplifted into the stratosphere to destroy ozone.  We show the striking parallel between the global loss of acreage due to fire and a proxy for jet-emplaced coal fly ash. This fundamentally new understanding of coal fly ash and its recombination into forest fire smoke with both particulate aerosols contributing to ongoing stratospheric ozone depletion is one profound reason that aerosolization of coal fly ash must cease and desist.