A few summers ago, I spent a week relaxing on a lake in the Ozarks. It was almost inarguably dirtier than a pool, yes. I could, to a degree, live in delusional bliss, ignorant of all the bodily fluids and, let’s be real, solids fluttering about in the lake. On the other hand, when your eyes get that horrible burning red in a swimming pool… science says it’s not the fucking chlorine.
Today’s Moment of Science… Watersports.
If you’ve been in a swimming pool, you’ve almost certainly gotten a splish of swimming pool water in your eyes. Just writing about it brings back a core memory that I’m sure I can feel drench my eyelids right now. It might be the pot but same feeling, really.
The chlorine. It burns us, precious.
But does it? Does it really? Eh.
Not without additional chemicals, some that you brought to the party.
(Well not “you,” of course. You’re never the one who peed in the pool, it was everyone else.)
A 2017 study from the American Chemical Society suggested that the average Olympic size swimming pool has twentysomeodd gallons of piss floating around in it. Just saying, somebody’s doing it.
“But Ms. Auntie SciBabe,” I hear some of you hopefully wondering if we can scrub our way free from human behavior, “I thought those chemicals cleaned urine out of the pool.”
Chlorine is one of a suite of chemicals and methods used to keep a pool sanitary. It’s effective at such low levels that, before the first ‘cannonball,’ the water doesn’t smell like much of anything. But what do we think these chemicals do, anyway? The addition of chlorine based sanitizers doesn’t ferry the piss out of the pool for adult swim. It’s just a molecule. At best it will react with other molecules. At worst, same.
With urine comes all the fun of ammonia, urea, and uric acid, amongst other unmentionable junk that should probably be scrubbed off your tuchus in the locker room. This is where the perfectly clean smelling pool turns into chemical fuckery. Several chemicals called chloramines form, the culprit for the swimming pool smell.
Cyanogen chloride is another hidden monster in the soup. It’s unclear what the exact route of synthesis is, and the level is ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ low. But that’s of little comfort when the chemical is a blood agent that was maybe a little too ‘yikes’ even for chemical warfare because it could get through gas mask filters. The community pool seemed an unlikely place to find microdoses of shit that breaks the Geneva Convention, but the fuck do I know?
Potential connections between exposure to chloramines at pools and ill health effects are still being studied. Until then, what can you do to help with this situation? Take a quick shower before you get into the pool. And for the love of eyeholes, use a toilet.
This has been your Moment of Science, absolutely sure that this plea will change nobody’s dirty little secrets.
To get the MOS delivered to your inbox every weekday and support me in my task to find out if perhaps science has gone too far this time, head to patreon.com/scibabe.
Join the discussion!