Why and how does smoke eventually disappear and become regular air?
In: Chemistry
If you mean smoke from burning stuff like wood or papers make? Smoke is combination of small particles like ashes and soot, and gas, which is carbon dioxide. It all disperses in air, and ashes and soot eventually fall to ground or water, eventually becomes part of soil, and continues the cycle as nutrient makeup of plant life. Its basically a fertilizer. And carbon dioxide just stays in air until it gets absorbed by plants.
You see smoke in the air because all the burning matter in the smoke is very close together, but the molecules/matter start to spread out and become distant from one another because there’s nothing to keep them together (no bonds). It is a process called *diffusion*. So eventually it gets spread out so thin that you can’t see it any more, because these particles are usually really small by themselves.
In crude terms, it’s the same process by which fart particles will spread out in a room. Say someone is standing in a corner of an auditorium and farts – a person standing next to the farter will get a strong whiff of it, but a person standing at the opposite corner won’t smell any because the particles have already diffused throughout the air.
Latest Answers