Chemical trails from planes confirmed! The truth revealed!

Chemical trails or "chemtrails" as some call them, are white trails usually seen to be left behind airplanes. Not all planes leave a visible chemical trail behind them, but I've managed to gather some solid information on the chemical trails and their effects.

In short, the main chemical in the chemical trail is a substance which can be harmful in many ways. It's causing several deaths around the world, it's known for being able to corrode metals, the chemical is found in human tumors and it's not listed as a harmful substance by any government.

What are chemicals?

Chemicals are a wide range of substances. The chemical elements are most known, the best known examples of the chemical elements are gold, silver, helium, iron, oxygen, uranium or hydrogen. As single atoms these are known as chemical elements.

However when the atoms are combined, be it O2 or H2O, this is called a chemical compound. Chemical compounds are chemical elements combined when they are in a form which cannot be broken without breaking the chemical bonds. This is the difference between mixtures and chemical compounds, while mixtures are physically combined, chemical compounds are combined on chemical level.

Typically when people talk about chemicals they're referring to man-made, though even substances like water are chemicals.

Chemical trails

When we see an airplane in the sky, we might see a white trail behind the plane. The secret chemical we can see in the trail is mostly water. The trail is condensed water (a chemical) which then is left in the sky in a narrow cloud-looking trail. In addition to water there can be some impurities in the trail, like sulphur from the fuel.

The likelihood and longevity of the chemical trails (also known as condension trails, contrails) is depending on multiple factors. For example in more humid atmosphere the trails are left for longer and if the atmosphere is dry, they disappear faster.

The dry and moist air can be seemingly close to each other when viewing from distance, but as two planes can be flying with greater distances than they seem, one plane trail might stay long and another disappear faster. This is also affected with the altitude the planes are flying in, as it's very difficult or impossible to see from the ground how high the planes are flying.

This can lead to curious situations, in which you see two planes leaving very different contrails even though they both are formed of water.

Harmful effects of the trails!

Lucky for us, there are very limited harmful effects with the trails. The issue is when the chem/contrails persist, they increase the clouditude and can affect the global temperature. The changes can be small, but with the current crisis with global warming, even a slight increase in temperature due to the trails is an issue. It's estimated that 0,1% of Earth's surface is covered by persistent contrails.

However this is only one of the things effecting the global temperature changes and new methods are studied in order to reduce the amount of trail forming. The methods vary from improving the airplane technology to more accurate atmospherical studies to choose flight paths with lower risk of persistent contrails.

_{And you remember the harmful effects I listed at start? Yes, water is causing several deaths around the world. People drown. It corrodes metal as we know how water can corrode iron etc. Humans are mostly water so tumors are usually mostly water and no, water is not listed as a harmful substance.}

Sources:
Why do some planes leave long trails, but others don’t?
Aircraft Contrails Factsheet, United States Environmental Protection Agency
All images from Pixabay.

_{Please tell me if I got something wrong, I've studied this mostly in Finnish so I had to translate into English with limited knowledge on the correct phrase usage}