Degradation of ethanol over SrCO3 nanowires and nanoparticles was used as a model reaction to investigate the effect of nanostructure on chemical property. Differences in catalytic degradation activity with nanostructure are evaluated. The results indicated that catalytic activity of SrCO3 particles increases with decreasing of particle size due to high surface area. But this conclusion cannot be applicable to evaluating SrCO3 nanowires and nanoparticles. SrCO3 nanowires have lower ignition temperatures and wider working temperature ranges than SrCO3 nanoparticles, though nanowires had lower surface areas. Besides, ethanol degraded over nanowires in three ways, and the dominating reaction changes with reaction temperature. Consequently, the main degradation products of nanowires differed with temperature. But for nanoparticles, acetaldehyde is the only main product. Since transmission electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, and bond equilibrium theory analysis demonstrated that nanowires and nanoparticles had similar crystal structure, surface area, and grain size, the differences in catalytic degradation activity between SrCO3 nanowires and nanoparticles can be attributed to different distributions of active sites, as proven by CO2 and ethanol temperature programmed desorption.