While the ozone is certainly on a path to healing, scientists say the hole won’t completely close until mid-century.
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The shocking discovery spurred scientists and governments into action.
Scientists credit this progress to the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an worldwide treaty that phased out chemicals that eat away at the ozone layer, which shields our planet from deadly levels of radiation.
Scientists are thrilled to announce that this seasonal hole is opening up later, and closing earlier, and has shrunk considerably. But, he adds, if nothing had been done, approximately two-thirds of the ozone layer would have been depleted by 2065 across the globe.
Susan Solomon, an atmospheric chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led the research which was published on Science journal. The hole reached its biggest size in October 2015, but Solomon and his research team found out this was only due to the fact that Mount Calbuco, a volcano in Chile, erupted during that same time. Overall, however, the ozone hole appears to be on a healing path. The Montreal Protocol, signed by most of the world’s nations in 1987, sought to curb human production of CFCs in a global effort to restore the ozone layer. “Which is pretty good for us, isn’t it?”
“Even though we have stopped producing them, what’s already there from your grandmother’s refrigerator that she got rid of in the 1970s or the hairspray that you put on in 1972, some of it is still left”, according to Solomon. During the regular monitoring, it was found that the ozone depletion process starts in late August every year and the complete hole forms by the starting of October. The team showed that as the chlorine has decreased, the rate at which the hole opens up in September has slowed down. “But October is also subject to the slings and arrows of other things that vary, like slight changes in meteorology”. “That point hasn’t really been made strongly in the past”. Researchers used weather balloons and satellite to get ozone level data. And, they tracked meteorological changes, such as temperature and wind, which can shift the ozone hole back and forth.
From September 21-30, 2006 the average area of the ozone hole was the largest ever observed, at 10.6 million square miles (27.5 million square kilometres).
Study’s co-researcher Diane Ivy, a researcher at MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences said, “It’s been interesting to think about this in a different month, and looking in September was a novel way”. Furthermore, the scientists have predicted that by 2050 the ozone hole above the South Pole will be permanently closed. “It was a shock to the scientific community”. When the ozone layer is weakened, more UV rays can get through and affect humans, making them prone to skin cancer, cataracts and other diseases. Solomon pointed to the healing of the ozone layer as a sign that there is hope, and with some political might behind us, we can respond intelligently to the challenges our climate faces right now. The chemistry demonstrated that chlorine under the effects of ultraviolet light aggressively eroded ozone. In 2012, however, the team reported the second smallest hole in the Antarctic ozone. A large surface of the Arctic ice sheet was directly exposed to UV radiation.
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And that’s why the effect of that ban is just beginning to show now.
