A significant ingredient required for the production of these Criegee biradicals comes from chemicals released quite naturally by plants, so natural ecosystems could be playing a significant role in off-setting warming.
Scientists have shown that a new molecule in the earth's atmosphere has the potential to play a significant role in off-setting global warming by cooling the planet. In a breakthrough paper published in Science, researchers from the University of Manchester , the University of Bristol and Sandia National Laboratories report the potentially revolutionary effects of Criegee biradicals. These invisible chemical intermediates are powerful oxidisers of pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide, produced by combustion, and can naturally clean up the atmosphere. Although these chemical intermediates were hypothesised in the 1950s, it is only now that they have been detected. Scientists now believe that, with further research, these species could play a major role in off-setting climate change. The detection of the Criegee biradical and measurement of how fast it reacts was made possible by a unique apparatus, designed by Sandia researchers, that uses light from a third-generation synchrotron facility, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source. The intense, tunable light from the synchrotron allowed researchers to discern the formation and removal of different isomeric species - molecules that contain the same atoms but arranged in different combinations.
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