Air pollution choking national parks
Air pollution in national parks such as Yellowstone, Yosemite and Acadia is as bad as some of America’s largest cities, and the foul air may be causing tourists to cut visits short or avoid going at all, according to a study released Wednesday.
“Even though the national parks are supposed to be icons of a pristine landscape, quite a lot of people are being exposed to ozone levels that could be detrimental to their health,” study co-author Ivan Rudik of Cornell University said.
Researchers from Iowa State and Cornell said visitor numbers dropped almost 2 percent when ozone levels went up slightly and at least 8 percent during months with bad air quality.
Ground-level ozone, also known as smog, forms on warm, sunny days and is made worse from chemicals from car and truck tailpipes and from power plant and industrial smokestacks.
This ozone can exacerbate asthma attacks and cause difficulty breathing. It differs from the “good” ozone in the stratosphere, which protects Earth from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays.
Researchers studied ozone levels in
33 of the largest national parks. From
1990 to 2014, average ozone concentrations in national parks were nearly the same as in the 20 largest U.S. metropolitan areas.
At Sequoia National Park, about 200 miles north of Los Angeles, the study found more bad ozone days in the park than in the city in every year since 1996, except for two years.
The study was published in Science Advances, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.