Environmental Chemistry is a branch of chemistry that studies the chemical transformations that occur in the environment .
Basic Information
Environmental chemistry includes narrower sections of chemistry, such as geochemistry , soil chemistry , hydrochemistry , atmospheric chemistry , chemistry of natural compounds of organic origin, etc. Environmental chemistry studies chemical processes in all shells of the Earth , including the biosphere, migration and conversion of all chemical compounds, including natural and man-made pollutants .
Recently, due to the significantly increased scale of human impact on the environment, with a significantly increased amount of pollutants of anthropogenic origin, environmental chemistry has been singled out in environmental chemistry , which studies the chemical processes in the earth's shells that occur under the influence of human activity. These concepts are so close that in some cases, researchers consider the terms “environmental chemistry” and “environmental chemistry” as synonyms.
Environmental chemistry studies the chemical processes in the complex — the sources of entry and migration of chemicals in the earth’s shells, their transformation, sinks from the earth’s shells (“ global cycles ”), the interaction of compounds and elements with each other; serves as the basis for the development and improvement of methods for protecting the environment from pollution, etc. This section of chemistry is closely related to many other sciences, including ecology , geology , etc.
Environmental chemistry structure:
- Physicochemical processes in the lithosphere , geochemistry
- Physico-chemical processes in the hydrosphere
- Physicochemical processes in the atmosphere
- Chemistry of pollutants of natural and anthropogenic origin (their intake, transformation, migration, withdrawal from the geospheres)
Environmental chemistry is characterized by all the basic methods of modern chemistry (chemical, physicochemical methods of analysis), but the frequent need to determine pollutants in microconcentrations forces scientists working in this field to widely use the latest combined methods - high-performance separation (for example, liquid chromatography ) and accurate qualitative and quantification (e.g., mass spectrometry ).
See also
- Pollutants
- Global chemicals cycles