The CHY1001 ‘Environmental Studies’ course is designed as a series of invited guest lectures along with project work. These lectures are focused on growing students’ awareness to the environment, understanding the fundamentals of our ecosystem, and ultimately towards finding the solutions of current environmental issues. Our seventh invited online lecture for the Fall 2020-21 semester was on ‘History of Air Pollution: Events and Episodes’, held with MS-Teams live event, where approximately 400 students participated.
The guest speaker, Dr. K. V. George, started his lecture explaining why our mother earth is considered as a closed system, and the importance of protecting its elements such as the atmosphere. He described the gradual exploitation of resources during the development of human civilization. Focusing on coal usage and other recourses, he explained how these exploitations are directly connected to the pollution of atmosphere. Air pollution episodes such as London Fog, Smog-Los Angeles have been reviewed. Examples of accidents such as Bhopal gas leak and Visakhapatnam styrene gas leak, and petroleum/LPG based air pollution such as Delhi smog were discussed. After the lecture, several questions and doubts have been asked by students, and Dr. George cleared them up in an extremely simple way.
Dr. Sabeel M Basheer, Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry coordinated the online lecture along with all other chemistry faculty members. Dr. Anubendu Adhikary, Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry chaired the session and invited the gathering, and Dr. Soumyakanta Prusty, Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry delivered vote of thanks and the online webinar lecture was concluded.