Suffocating Mist: The Lethal Inversion of the Meuse Valley

History often points to the Great Smog of London as the dawn of deadly air pollution, but the true paradigm shift happened two decades earlier in a heavily industrialized Belgian river valley. In December 1930, a thick, freezing fog rolled into the Meuse Valley and simply refused to leave. Due to a rare meteorological phenomenon known as a temperature inversion, the toxic emissions from the valle...