A University of California, Davis, nuclear physicist reports finding a surprising quantity of fine salt in atmospheric samples gathered above burning Kuwaiti oil wells, which may implicate the fires as a strong suspect in this year's especially heavy rains and tragic flooding in the Philippines and China. Thomas Cahill, director of the Air Quality Group at Crocker Nuclear Laboratory, will discuss this and other elemental features of the smoke at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting in San Francisco on Tuesday morning, Dec. 10, during a symposium on the atmospheric effects of the Kuwaiti oil fires. In addition to the salty oil field brine apparently steaming up with the smoke, the analysis revealed higher levels of biologically dangerous metals than some experts had predicted. "We estimate that the smoke deposited well over 1,000 tons of fine vanadium particles and 500 tons of nickel on the desert and in the gulf around Kuwait," Cahill says. "It means a lot of toxic materials could enter the biosphere and cause concern for years regarding milk, crops and fish." Other toxic elements were present in relatively low concentrations, Cahill reports. However, the concentration of sulphates in the samples were often as high as typical levels found in the eastern United States. Some of Cahill's data was presented recently at the Fourth Chemical Congress of North America. To develop an elemental "fingerprint" of Kuwaiti smoke, Cahill and his colleagues measured the chemical elements of the crude oil from eight Kuwaiti oil fields, as well as the oil's byproducts when ignited in their laboratory. Atmospheric smoke was analyzed using the same equipment and techniques adapted from nuclear physics. The sodium chloride was found only in the samples gathered in the air above Kuwait.