Air pollution can come from natural sources like volcanoes and wildfires, but man-made causes like burning fossil fuels and emissions from factories are the most common. Both natural and man-made sources can have health risks, and volcanic eruptions can cause widespread damage like famines and crop failures.
Air pollution can be defined as any harmful material present in the earth’s atmosphere. The causes of this pollution, therefore, are many and very varied. Some sources are natural, such as volcanism or forest fires caused by lightning, while others are caused by human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels. While the earth has built-in mechanisms for eliminating air pollution, it’s usually best for all living things to reduce the amount of pollutants released into the air to begin with.
The best known and most pervasive causes of air pollution are man-made. The burning of petroleum products is a very common cause of pollution, especially in metropolitan areas. This pollution comes from chemical factors present when these fuels burn. When hydrocarbons such as gasoline are burned, they produce carbon dioxide and water vapor. Incomplete combustion also leads to the creation of carbon monoxide as a byproduct.
Carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide are both considered pollutants. Furthermore, no fossil fuel is perfectly pure and no engine is perfectly efficient, so even small soot particles are released into the atmosphere, along with traces of other undesirable substances. Other man-made causes of air pollution include emissions from smokestacks from factories and power plants. The substances emitted by these sources can include sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, responsible for the formation of acid rain.
While human-caused air pollution has health risks, natural sources of air pollution can be equally dangerous at times. These sources include dust collected by wind erosion, methane emissions from livestock, and smoke from wildfires. Volcanic eruptions are perhaps the largest single source of natural or man-made air pollution that man has ever dealt with. These can produce clouds of abrasive volcanic ash and other harmful substances such as chlorine and sulfur.
In particular, the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 sent such large amounts of harmful gases and particulate matter into the atmosphere, that much of the sun’s energy was effectively prevented from reaching the earth’s surface. As a result, widespread famines occurred throughout the world in 1816. Brown and red snowfalls were also observed in Europe, due to the presence of volcanic ash in the atmosphere. A deadly frost in July of 1816 also led to massive crop failures in the northeastern United States, leading to colloquial references to 1816 such as “The Year Without a Summer” and “Eighteen Hundred And Froze To Death.”
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