Tar balls in the sky
The burning of trees, crop residues and other types of biomass can spew huge quantities of soot and other carbonaceous pollutants, including nanosized tar balls. Researchers at Arizona State University in Tempe now find that these tar balls have almost the same light-absorbing and air-warming capacity as soot — and the quantity of tar balls present in biomass smoke plumes can be roughly double that of soot.
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