My first year of college finished up with me as an Environmental Science major in the
Food and Natural Resources Department at UMASS. I met up with a professor of mine named
Dr. William Manning. He brought me aboard to head up his weather station and ozone
monitoring experiments that he was conducting for the National Forest Service. I set up
multiple stations, one in Amherst near the school, another in southwestern Vermont
on the backside of Mt. Equinox, the last major site was at the foot of the Mt. Washington auto
road. We went about setting up 4 - 6 active monitoring 'bubbles' per site. These bubbles
were large (12' tall and 8' wide) aluminum, cylindrical behemoths with 6 mm plastic, and lots
of sharp corners. With much bleeding of our own hands to protect the nylon plastic, we set these
chambers up. Blowing air into each chamber were 220V large motor systems. You can see them
in the above picture with their mouths attaching to the rather phallic looking connection to
the chambers. These large blowers differed in one way. Half the units would blow regular,
or ambient air into the chambers. These chambers were filled with tobacco plants.
Tobacco is the worlds' greatest bio-indicator of high levels of ozone, showing stipling of the
underside of the leaves by 60 parts per billion (ppb) of ozone. The other large blowers
pushed the air through concentrated charcoal filters. This 'cleaned' the air of all ozone.
The study then showed the difference between the plants in different chambers. Further,
within the small building on each of my weather stations had devices for monitoring the ground
temperature, air temperature, wind speed and direction, ground labedo, rain fall, and,
of course, for measuring the levels of tropospheric (ground level) ozone.

Results: Well, they were mixed. It comes down to this. Would you rather have lung cancer
or skin cancer? See, the ozone hole in the stratosphere (the hole in the upper atmosphere caused by the release
of chlorofluorcarbons --> CFCs - a stray Chlorine ion can start a chain reaction and literally
catalyze the destruction of millions of ozone (O3 - 3 oxygen atoms covalently bonded in a
triangular form) molecules, thus creating the ozone hole. This hole allows ultraviolet (UV) light from the sun
to pass unhindered into the atmosphere proper, penetrating to the surface of the earth. Well, we're at
the surface of the earth, right? Yup, we sure are. The UV light is high energy, when it hits our skin,
it is actually, empirically speaking, striking the DNA (Deoxyribonucleaic Acid) in our skin. Well, in some
cases, this energy can be transferred into the DNA itself, and can cause the Thymine molecule
(a major component of the DNA's double helix structure) to lose its covalent bond with the chain
proper and bond with another Thymine molecule at its side. This is what is called a mutation. Now,
this happens all the time anyway, your body has a killer (no pun intended) immune system, and can go
into the DNA and slice away and correct this error. Well, the immune system has limts, and if you
get too many thymine-dimers as they are called, you may miss fixing one. This can lead to improper
replication of the DNA chain and to further mutations which can lead to melanoma (skin cancer) or other
cancers possibly as well.

OK, that sounds bad, right?

Now, the flip side. Let's look at smog. Smogs' main constituent is indeed ozone. It is just present at
ground level. Ozone blocks UV light, right? Yup, it indeed will block UV light, and help prevent the thymine-dimers from ever ocurring. This will indeed lower our cases of melanoma on average. That's good. Problem is that breathing ozone is not
good at all. In fact, it is terrible. It is so reactive, we can see the damage to tobacco plants in 60 parts ozone per 1 billion
parts ambient atmosphere (interesting definition to that too). You should see what ozone does to rubber, and in fact,
has caused billions of dollars of damage to tires over the years (a whole industry has appeared to make tires ozone or
smog resistant). At any rate, it does things akin to this to your lungs too, and can cause mutations there, possibly
leading to lung cancer.

So next time someone tells you smog is all bad, you can say it may help prevent skin cancer, and that breathing through
a gas mask is a small price to pay to not having to wear sun block or UV protecting shades. The choice is
yours. Anyway, enough ranting on this subject; and yes, I did just recall all the above from memory from my past.

If computers go sour, I have not the slightest problem jumping back into what I majored in,
Environmental Science and Chemistry.