Meteoritic materials within sulfate aerosol particles in the troposphere are detected with transmission electron microscopy
Meteoritic materials within sulfate aerosol particles in the troposphere are detected with transmission electron microscopy
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DOI：
10.1038/s43247-022-00469-8
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发表时间：
2022-06
影响因子：
7.9
通讯作者：
K. Adachi;N. Oshima;N. Takegawa;N. Moteki;M. Koike
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
K. Adachi;N. Oshima;N. Takegawa;N. Moteki;M. Koike
当陨石撞击地球大气层时，它们会分裂和消融，产生含有行星际物质的气溶胶颗粒。已使用元素标记（铁和镁）在气溶胶颗粒中识别出陨石物质;然而，它们的形状和混合状态在很大程度上是未知的。在这里，我们证明了存在的陨石材料收集的研究飞机从对流层在西太平洋使用透射电子显微镜。陨石元素在单个颗粒中的分布与硫一致，表明它们是硫酸盐形式，即，水溶性的在对流层顶折叠事件中，观测到硫酸盐颗粒与陨石物质的数量分数增加，表明它们来自平流层。我们还估计了车里雅宾斯克陨石事件的潜在贡献，该事件发生在采样前5个月，是过去世纪最大的陨石事件。这项研究为行星外物质与对流层气溶胶之间的联系提供了独特的观测证据。
When meteorites impact the Earth’s atmosphere, they fractionalize and ablate, generating aerosol particles containing extraplanetary materials. Meteoritic materials have been identified among aerosol particles using elemental markers (iron and magnesium); however, their shapes and mixing states are largely unknown. Here we demonstrate the presence of meteoritic materials collected by a research aircraft from the troposphere over the western Pacific using transmission electron microscopy. The distribution of meteoritic elements within individual particles coincided with sulfur, indicating that they were in forms of sulfates, i.e., water-soluble. Enhanced number fractions of sulfate particles with meteoritic materials were observed during tropopause-folding events, suggesting that they originated from the stratosphere. We also estimated the potential contributions of the Chelyabinsk meteorite event, which occurred 5 months prior to the sampling and represents the largest meteorite event in the past century. This study provides unique observational evidence for the linkage between extraplanetary materials and tropospheric aerosols.