Hey, I'm Josh Clark.
And today I'm going
to help you get
to the bottom of a
very pressing question.
Why is dry ice dangerous?
Well, it turns out dry ice
is dangerous for a couple
of reasons, one is
its temperature.
Now it's ice, but it's
really, really cold ice.
Dry ice is at about
negative 109 degrees
Fahrenheit, which is something
like 78.5 degrees Celsius--
that's off the top
of my head-- which
means it's very, very cold.
It's so cold, in fact, that
when your skin comes in contact
with dry ice, it can get
what's called a dry ice burn.
Which basically amounts to
the dry ice just killing
all of your skin cells
dead within about a second.
So you never want to touch
dry ice with your bare hands.
You certainly never want
to swallow it or eat it.
Don't look at it weird.
Just be really careful
when coming into contact
with dry ice, all right?
Gloves, tongs,
maybe some goggles,
duct tape over your mouth,
make sure you can breathe out
of your nose, and
that's how you handle
dry ice as far as I'm concerned.
The other way dry ice can
harm you is through the CO2
that it gives off.
Dry ice sublimates, which means
it goes from its solid state
to its gaseous state skipping
the liquid state in between,
which is why they
call it dry ice.
And when it goes into
that gaseous state,
it gives off CO2.
That CO2 can be toxic to you.
The air we breathe has about
78% nitrogen to it, about 21%
oxygen, and just
a teeny tiny bit
of carbon dioxide
at any given point.
When you're in a car with
the windows rolled up
and dry ice is kind of
spewing CO2 everywhere,
those CO2 levels could rise.
And once it goes beyond
5%, you've got a problem.
The air becomes
toxic, you choke,
you drive off the
side of the road
with duct tape over your
mouth and safety goggles on.
And people just think
you're into some weird stuff
because the dry ice
sublimated into nothingness--
you just have an empty cooler.
It becomes a mystery, basically.
So in summation, I would
say steer clear of dry ice
entirely.
Thank you.
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