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Trains now on Uber. T's and C's apply check the Uber app. This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Suzanne Bard.

Near the end of the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution began to transform Great Britain.

Machines replaced hand tools, factories sprouted up in cities and towns, and a sharp uptick

in coal combustion polluted the skies.

The Industrial Revolution and the pollution that followed in its wake soon spread to the

rest of Europe.

But some of the smoke and ash didn't stay there. It also drifted into the upper

atmosphere and was blown by winter winds all the way to the frigid Himalayas.

This ash was transported for thousands of kilometers and eventually it was deposited with the snowflakes.

Environmental scientist Paolo Gabrielli of the Ohio State University.

His team found signatures of airborne pollution from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Tibet.

Specifically, in ice cores taken from a glacier nearly 24,000 feet above sea level on

Mount Shishipagma.

Such ice cores are like time capsules that contain a record of the contaminants that were mixed in with each year's

snowfall.

And we are able to count annual layers from the surface down to adapt in this case of even more than 500 years covering a time period between

year 1,500 AP to 1992. At the beginning of our record we didn't observe any kind of

anthropogenic contribution in our eyes and this lasted until about the year 1780.

At that time, we start to observe an enrichment

...