Wildfires May Be More Toxic Than Scientists Thought
Researchers had to fly a plane through a smoke plume to realize this.
It was a hot Monday in August 2013, just before dawn. A team of scientists stood on the tarmac in Houston. They had the keys to an unusual aircraft: a NASA-owned DC-8 jumbo jet with a laboratory inside it.
They made for a large and diverse group: chemists and geoscientists, meteorologists and climatologists, engineers and pilots. Their primary mission took them over patches of woods across the U.S. Southwest, where they measured the kind of chemicals off-gassed by trees.
