The recovery of the ozone layer — which sits miles above the Earth and protects the planet from ultraviolet radiation — has been celebrated as one of the world’s greatest environmental achievements. But in a new study published Tuesday, some scientists claim it may not be recovering at all, and that the hole may even be expanding.
The findings are in disagreement with widely accepted assessments of the ozone layer’s status, including a recent UN-backed study that showed it would return to 1980s levels as soon as 2040.
In 1987, several countries agreed to ban or phase down the use of more than 100 ozone-depleting chemicals that had caused a “hole” in the layer above Antarctica. The depletion is mainly attributed to the use of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which were common in aerosol sprays, solvents and refrigerants.
That ban, agreed under the Montreal Protocol, is widely considered to have been effective in aiding the ozone layer’s recovery.
But the hole, which grows over the Antarctic during spring before shrinking again in the summer, reached record sizes in 2020 to 2022, prompting scientists in New Zealand to investigate why.
The odds that we have successfully stopped using ozone depleting things is very low, since there is likely still undiscovered chemistry at play, and we cannot truly monitor global participation in bans for chemicals we have actually confirmed are dangerous.
Fortunately, the mechanisms that make more ozone (lightning, for instance) are still ongoing, so if we identify the new culprits, we can still get ahead of this problem.
Which would be ideal, since losing both the ozone layer and getting a potentially weakened magnetic field simultaneously would make skin cancer rates jump way up, which would suck.
Isn’t China just disregarding existing rules anyways?
There’s some atmospheric spectrometer satellites in place. More resolution from planned missions will make better monitoring possible.
I’m not up to date on everything in this field, but here’s an example ozone monitoring mission ongoing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aura_(satellite)
This paper mentions several other missions:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-019-0210-6
We can already do that today with inverse modeling of atmospheric substance transport and the satellites you mentioned. Heard a talk about the topic on a conference 4 years ago. That’s how scientists could pinpoint the emission source for some illegally emmitted CFCs in China (and afaik the Chinese govt acted accordingly). With high resolution data you can also use these methods to detect methane leaks in gas pipelines etc.
Could try running giant Tesla coils to generate a constant amount of Ozone, if a big amount of electricity but in a short burst helps make it, then a smaller amount running consistently should work too right?
Also, the Ozone layer might not be repairing as quickly as we’d hoped, but the Montreal Protocol chemicals had also been significant contributors to climate change, as they were even more potent greenhouse gasses than CO2, so their removal from mass usage has done work in mitigating the crisis. It’s why targets for max rise are 2-3 degrees as opposed to I think the original numbers were 5-6.