An Introduction to Environmental Chemistry

electrons. These elements form doubly charged or divalent ions (Be^2 +, Mg^2 +and Ca^2 +) and are known as alkali earth metals ( ...

is required to remove these electrons due to the increasing nuclear attraction. This means that aluminium will form trivalent ca ...

usually depending on oxidation state (see Box 4.3), these lower orbital electrons act as additional valence electrons. For examp ...

oxygen (O), and to a lesser extent hydrogen (H), are superabundant in most Earth surface materials such as air, water, organic m ...

Thus bond formation can be envisaged as a result of attaining noble-gas-type structures that have particularly stable configurat ...

Similarly, non-metals whose atoms have one, two or three electrons less than an inert gas structure form monovalent (e.g. bromin ...

tion 2.7, NaCl is an electrically neutral compound, whilst on the right side sodium and chloride each carry a single but opposit ...

eqn. 2.8 The formation of these ion pairs (see Box 6.4) further reduces the effective concentration, and the frequency of collis ...

constituent of natural gas (Fig. 2.4a). When all the carbon atoms in a compound are joined by single bonds (Section 2.3.1) the s ...

It is easy to imagine this structure bent around upon itself into a ring or cycle, such that the first carbon atom in the chain ...

–COOH functional groups, for example, increase the polarity of the molecule (see Box 4.14), increasing its aqueous solubility. O ...

Again, it is easy to see that glucose might form a six-carbon cyclic unit. However this molecule cannot be considered aromatic b ...

particle. Thus the Znumber of the nucleus is decreased by 1 from K (Z=19) to Ar (Z=18), but the mass number is unchanged. This s ...

oceans. Perhaps most infamous was the fire and explosion at the Ukranian Chernobyl power plant in 1986 which released a cocktail ...

2.10 Further reading Atkins, P. (1995) The Periodic Kingdom. A Journey into the Land of the Chemical Elements. Phoenix, London. ...

3 The atmosphere 3.1 Introduction The atmosphere is in the news! Atmospheric chemistry has become a matter of public concern in ...

3.2 Composition of the atmosphere Bulk composition of the atmosphere is quite similar all over the Earth because of the high deg ...

violet radiation by oxygen (O 2 ) and O 3. The rise in temperature with height has the effect of giving the upper part of the at ...

relative concentrations (see Section 2.6) of atomic oxygen (O) and nitrogen (N) are greatest lower down, while the lighter hydro ...

where pzis the pressure at altitude z, p 0 the pressure at ground level and H, the scale height (about 8.4 km in the lower tropo ...