Take a guess how far salt air travels.
As most people know, salt air is highly corrosive. That’s because salt is hygroscopic, meaning it attracts water. And salt increases the ability of water to carry electrons, which get corrosive when a redox reaction occurs (reduction and oxidation).
Most people know that salt air is most prevalent in coastal zones. What they may not know is just how far inland salt air is present. What would you guess? Ten miles? Twenty?
Try 900 miles. Yep, researchers detected sea spray in Boulder, Colorado - some 900 miles from any ocean. Researcher Joel Thornton, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Washington said, “We discovered chlorine chemistry happening in a region we didn’t expect it to be happening.”
The researchers concluded that as much ten billion metric tons of chlorine enters the atmosphere from sea spray annually, and all of it falls back to the surface except for a tiny fraction (one-third of 1% is the estimate).
“We discovered chlorine chemistry happening in a region we didn’t expect it to be happening”
Of course, coastal zones remain the biggest corrosion threat, but in places like Florida they find highly corrosive conditions as far as 100 miles inland.
So, while corrosion is a more pressing threat in areas close to the sea, there’s a need to cast a much wider corrosion-prevention net than you might have thought.
References and additional reading:
nationalgeographic.com/science/article/100310-sea-spray-ocean-colorado-pollution