Why Is Dry Ice Dangerous?

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.