Good News Green: Ozone Layer Closing
With so many things happening in our environment, in our world — the tsunamis in the South East and the unusual tropical storms that leave thousands people dead or homeless, the effects of toxic chemicals, pollution and the like — it’s so easy to forget and focus on the good news. But we have it. Something is still going right with our efforts to make the Earth better.
In the 1980′s we learned that because of our own undoing, we caused a huge hole in the ozone layer that somehow affected the world’s climate and rendered the atmosphere very harmful.
Now, two decades later, it should please everyone to know that the hole is closing up! That’s great news, right?
When people learned of what we’ve done, we took action. We have been made aware of its effects that many governments took measure like banning the use and sale of CFCs, which was the largest contributor to the damage.
The hole is not entirely closed up but with our efforts, we are getting to that goal.
A study by the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne has confirmed this.
Part of the interview follows after the cut…
Photo is from Google Images.
FELICITY OGILVIE: The scientists are thankful that the worst case scenario has been averted and the hole is now shrinking. The Australian Antarctic Division is using weather balloons and lasers to measure the hole in the ozone layer. Andrew Klekociuk is the head research scientist.
ANDREW KLEKOCIUK: We’ve been looking at the ozone hole from Davis station and this year we certainly see that the ozone hole is not as large as it was last year, but similar in some respects to 2007, so yes it is smaller than last year in particular.
FELICITY OGILVIE: And just how small is small? How big or small is the hole in the ozone layer now?
ANDREW KLEKOCIUK: Well it’s still very large, it’s over three times the area of Australia so this year’s ozone hole would rank in the top 10 or so ozone holes that we’ve seen, but certainly not as large as 2006 which was a record year or 2000 which was quite similar to that one.
FELICITY OGILVIE: Measurements taken in Antarctica just a few days ago show the hole in the ozone layer is now 26 million square kilometres. It has a long way to go before it closes up but Melbourne University’s climate change fellow, Roger Dargaville, expects it will continue to shrink.
ROGER DARGAVILLE: The ozone hole was an environmental disaster with the amount of UV radiation coming through the surface in the Antarctic reaching really extreme levels, so the fact that the hole is now appearing to be closing up means that the Montreal Protocol, perhaps one of the most successful treaties ever signed, is actually doing a really good job.
FELICITY OGILVIE: The hole is invisible to the naked eye, but thanks to his lasers Andrew Klekociuk says he’s seen what it looks like.
ANDREW KLEKOCIUK: A region that’s extremely cold, with pressures that are similar to the surface of Mars where winds are whipping around at up to well over 300 kilometres per hour at times, quite a hostile environment. And the stratospheric clouds themselves are comprised not of water ice that we general see near the surface but also acid droplets, sulphuric and nitric acid. So that’s a pretty hostile place, quite different to what we experience on the ground.
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