Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff, it's Christian Seger, 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 that dry ice is dangerous for a couple of reasons, and one is temperature. Now it's ice, but it's really, really really cold ice. Dry ice is about negative one and nine degrees fahrenheit, which is something like seventy eight point five
degrees celsius, 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. This 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, and you certainly never want to swallow it or eat it. Don't even look at it weird. Just be really careful
when coming into contact with dry ice. I would recommend gloves, tongs, maybe some goggles, some duct tape over your mouth, and make sure that you can breathe out of your nose. And that is how you should handle dry ice, at least as far as I'm concerned. The other way dry ice can harm you, though, is through the carbon dioxide 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 carbon dioxide that can be toxic to you. The air we breathe has about seventy nitrogen to it and about oxygen and just a teeny tiny bit of carbon dioxide at any given point. Now, when you're in a car with the windows rolled up and dry ice is kind of spewing carbon dioxide everywhere, those carbon dioxide levels could rise, and once it goes beyond five, you're
gonna have a problem. The air becomes toxic. You choke, you'll probably drive off the side of the road, and you've got that duct tape all over your mouth and safety goggles on, and people just think you're into some really weird stuff because the dry ice, it's sublimated into nothingness, so you've just got an empty cooler next to you. It becomes a mystery basically. So in summation, I would
just stay clear of dry ice entirely. Check out the brain stuff channel on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.