Reflections on the ozone hole

摘要

Twenty-five years ago, Joseph Farman, Brian Gardiner and I discovered that Earth's protective layer of ozone was thinning dramatically above the Halley Research Station in Antarctica. We reported in Nature1 that the minimum amount of ozone seen each spring in the Southern Hemisphere had declined sharply since the late 1970s, and that this was linked to a corresponding rise in the amount of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmosphere - which were commonly used as refrigerants and propellants at the time.