http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6323611.stm Russia probes smelly orange snow Russia has flown a team of chemical experts to a Siberian region to find out why smelly, coloured snow has been falling over several towns. Oily yellow and orange snowflakes fell over an area of more than 1,500sq km (570sq miles) in the Omsk region on Wednesday, Russian officials said.
There is a lot of industrial mining activity in that region. Smelters with high sulfur emissions can produce such an effect. There are even "dead zones" around industrial settlements as the heavy metal fallout turned the tundra and soils so acidic everything died off. Similar events happened in Sudbury Ontario at the giant INCO smelter. When NASA was training astronauts for moon landings, they sent them to Sudbury. It's about the only moonscape environment with a - barely - breathable atmosphere. INCO built the "superstack" starting in 1972, which at 1,247 ft is the tallest chimney in North America and indeed the world until 1987, when the GRES-2 powerstation in Kazakhstan built their own superstack. Ironically though the superstack greatly reduced the environmental decimation of Sudbury, it has become the largest single point source of acid rain for all of North America. In Ontario alone up to 7,000 lakes have been severely affected by the superstack emissions.
