There’s also something deeply unsettling about the smell of O3 in any concentration where you can truly smell it, not like getting punched in the lungs that ammonia bicarbonate is, and less irritating than than NOx compounds, but the almost sweet and sickly pleasant smell to it carries a sense of dread.

Speaking of which NOx is another good one; N2 is (essentially) inert and makes up most of our atmosphere, O2 has already been explained, but run a high frequency (white) electric arc in our atmosphere and you cause the N2 and O2 to combine in varying quantities producing NOx compounds.

NOx compounds are effectively gaseous nitric acid, it has a brown/red colour, and on constant with water it forms nitric acid. It doesn’t matter whether that water is in a beaker with the NOx being bubbled through it, or the water that exists in your sinuses, lungs and eyes.

You lose your sense of smell pretty quickly when exposed to it and concentrations can build up quicker than you expected, if you’ve been overexposed to it, you’ll wake up the next day or even a few hours later, feeling like you’ve got the worst sore throat in your life, like someone stamped on your throat then tried to scrape it clean… assuming you do wake up.

1/10 do not recommend.

This high propensity for reaction is also why we got a massive hole in the ozone layer. Aerosols and hydrocarbons got dumped into the atmosphere, causing a massive portion of our ozone to split into O2 and free O due to higher exposure to UV radiation. All of that newly freed singular oxygen then started binding with the hydrocarbons in the upper atmosphere instead of reforming into ozone, heavily depleting it over time

Freedom is good. Radicals are cool. so…

O3 is an unstable molecule that acts effectively like bleach, it forces an Oxygen atom/ion onto another molecule. This tends to do significant damage to large hydrocarbons, like those making up our bodies and the cells’ internal machinery.

It’s produced naturally by sunlight hitting oxygen molecules in the atmosphere, and by lightning. It’s also a byproduct of a number of processes, like some combustion engine designs. It then breaks down quite quickly into normal oxygen, either by reacting with something else, or by combining with a 2nd O3 (2O3 ==> 3O2). This has a short half life of around 20 minutes.