Word: nitric
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...pelted the slopes of the Rockies, and has already affected Scandinavia and much of industrialized Western Europe and Japan. It is a newly recognized and increasingly harmful kind of pollution, invisible and insidious: acid rain, a corrosive precipitation that actually consists of weak solutions of sulfuric and nitric acids...
...dioxide emissions from coal-burning power plants, smelters and factories. To a lesser extent, nitrogen oxides from car exhausts and industry contribute to the problem. Rising high into the sky and borne hundreds of miles by winds, these chemicals mix and react with water vapor to form sulfuric and nitric acids. The acids then fall to earth in the form of rain or snow that can damage anything from monuments to living organisms. After a number of such rain showers or highly acidic snow melts, a lake's pH* can plunge low enough to impair the egg-producing ability...
Glashow synthesized nitrogen tetra-iodide, an extremely unstable compound which explodes when anything is dropped on it, and took to soaking dollar bills in nitric acid. This turns the dollar bill into flashpaper, which burns very rapidly and leaves no ash. Glashow gave this up when it became too expensive...
...field. But near the poles, where the lines of the field bend toward the earth, the protons slam into molecules in the upper atmosphere and cause a shower of electrons. These, in turn, crash into nitrogen molecules, ionizing them and allowing them to combine with oxygen. As a result, nitric oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ) are formed; both react readily with ozone molecules and cause their destruction...
These grim warnings closely follow reports by other scientists on the potentially disastrous effects of nitric oxides, which also strip ozone of its third atom and reduce it to ordinary oxygen. Large amounts of nitric oxides are given off by the exhausts of supersonic aircraft, and a recent M.I.T. study (TIME, Sept. 9) indicates that a fleet of 500 SSTs flying regularly in or near the ozone layer would deplete it by 12% within 25 years. In the past few months, scientists have been emphasizing the even greater menace of nuclear explosions, which generate huge amounts of nitric oxides...