You're going to laugh, but the largest ever ozone hole opens over North Pole

[Silver Cat]

Watch the 'largest ever' ozone hole opening over the North Pole

The current depletion in the Arctic looks set to surpass smaller holes recorded in 1997 and 2011

www.independent.co.uk

A hole has opened in the ozone layer above the Arctic and looks set to become the largest on record for the region.

Maps of the Arctic Hemisphere from NASA’s Ozone Watch, created with satellite data, show the hole growing in size from late last year until now.

The hole looks set to break up in the coming weeks but not before setting a new record in ozone layer depletion at the North Pole.

"From my point of view, this is the first time you can speak about a real ozone hole in the Arctic,” Martin Dameris, an atmospheric scientist at the German Aerospace Center, told Nature.



The ozone layer is a protective shield in the Earth’s stratosphere which absorbs some of the ultraviolet radiation reaching us from the sun. Without the ozone layer, it would be nearly impossible for anything to survive on the planet.

In Antarctica, the thickness of the ozone changes with the season. The freezing winters lead to high-altitude clouds combining with ozone-damaging chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), that have been lingering in the atmosphere for decades, to thin out the layer.

 

[there4eyeM]

Didn't realize CFCs were still so active, or I suppose it's reactive.

 

[konradv]

You can't really reach any conclusions based on a single season. Variations occur all the time.

 

[JGalt]

Arrrrghhh!!!

 

[SSDD]

The hole is due to changes in solar output in specific frequencies that produce ozone as a result of the sun going into a minimum.

CFC’s were never a threat to the ozone.

 

[SSDD]

The ozone layer is a protective shield in the Earth’s stratosphere which absorbs some of the ultraviolet radiation reaching us from the sun. Without the ozone layer, it would be nearly impossible for anything to survive on the planet.

Actually, the ozone layer is the result of high altitude oxygen absorbing most of the harmful UV radiation from the sun. It requires a great deal of energy to break O2 into elemental O which then reforms...some of which becomes O3. O3 is a very unstable molecule which only hangs around for a period of minutes in the upper atmosphere and requires very little energy to break. O3 does absorb some UV..but O2 is the workhorse as it requires so much more energy to be broken.

O3 is the result of high energy UV radiation being absorbed by O2 molecules which is what actually protects us from the bulk of harmful UV incoming from the sun.

 

[Meister]

Thread closed, there is no original content from the OP