the.com/smog
sky soup brewed by cities that forgot air was supposed to be invisible.
means A thick, polluted haze hanging over a city, formed when smoke or vehicle exhaust mixes with fog or stagnant air.
from A blend word — literally smoke + fog squashed together — coined in the early 20th century to name the choking murk that settled over industrial cities like London. It's a portmanteau in the same family as 'brunch,' two words fused because the thing they described was itself a fusion.
- name origin
- coined in 1905 by blending smoke and fog
- deadly week
- London's 1952 smog killed roughly 12,000 people
- chemistry
- sunlight cooks exhaust into ground-level ozone
- visible from space
- satellites map smog blooms over megacities
- color cue
- that brown haze is nitrogen dioxide showing off
for instance
great smog of london — killed ~12,000 people in december 1952
beijing air pollution — air quality index exceeded 1000 in january 2013
los angeles smog — photochemical smog peak in 1970s, now largely reduced