Tracking the pollution amid the remote
Jasna Pittman expected to be surprised by new findings as she traveled around the world measuring gases and particles in a three-year effort to understand how the atmosphere works. She didn’t expect to be shocked by what she already knew. “Alaska is incredible, absolutely breathtaking. We were there in the wintertime, so you could see all the mountains covered in snow, beautiful blue skies,” said Pittman, a research associate in atmospheric sciences at Harvard. “You look out far away, and you see this layer of haze.” It has long been known that pollution is blown into Alaska’s skies from Europe and Asia, but Pittman and other scientists who participated in a three-year project to gather data on the Earth’s atmosphere said their prior knowledge didn’t lessen the impact of seeing the pollution firsthand. “It looked like Los Angeles,” said Steven Wofsy, the project’s principal investigator and the Abbott Lawrence Rotch Professor of Atmospheric and...