What is Arctic Haze?
Arctic Haze is a different kind of pollution that dust. Dust pollution is natural. Arctic Haze is a layered black haze you tend to see in the Arctic. It’s mainly produced from industrial emissions such as power plant emissions and metal smith emissions, typically from Northern Russian and Northern Europe. The power plants produce clouds of pollution that is transported around the pole by the wind. You can see it come across as a black set of layered hazes coming over the fairly clean Arctic environment. The clouds of pollution contain metals and other materials that act as fingerprints in the same way that dust has a fingerprint. By looking at the composition of the pollution, one can determine where it came from. In Alaska, we see Arctic Haze every winter. The power plants emit directly into what we call the polar air mass. During the winter, there’s a great big cold mass of air that sits right over the pole. It often comes down as far south as the Aleutians. This cool air mass is ver
