May 29, 2004

A Hole. Its fascinating to watch it develop over the last five years or so.

A Tour of the hole.

posted by dng 20 years ago
  • This is not good.
  • I dunno; it could be worse.
  • Depressing stuff. Funny the way you posted it, though -- I was waiting to pounce, thinking it was going to be the sixteenth snake-hole post. Good sites.
  • What I want to know is whether the risk of sunburn in Antarctica is greater than in the Arctic regions. Most Antarctic pics I've seen show a lot of unprotected people. I do realize that being atop the ice cap biases this since a third of the atmosphere is gone at that elevation.
  • Sunburn and eye damage.
  • Quick question. Ozone is three oxygen atoms forming one molecule, as opposed to the oxygen we breathe here, which is O2, 2 atoms. Ozone isn't stable down here as it's not receiving tons of energy from the sun, but in the upper parts of the atmosphere, enough energy is fired at the O2 molecules to get them to turn into O3. It's not as if somehow it's a new compound or something - the sun replenishes the ozone layer for us. It is self-renewing. Do environmentalists have a particular reason that the sun isn't making any O3 there? Even if you "destroy" O3 (in other words, you make it into O2), it's just as easily made again with sufficient energy. So, um, how is that our fault, and not, say, the sun's?
  • CFCs.
  • yup. it's a question of rates. ozone is being destroyed faster than it can be replenished.
  • Yeah, that's the hopeful part -- pretty much all we have to do is reduce greenhouse gas emissions to an acceptable level and let 'em stay that way, and the hole will gradually fix itself (which beats my really-tall-ladder-and-really-big-box-of-saran-wrap solution). Problem is that we're not doing so well. (Not trying to fling poo, honestly.) Kyoto called for a mere 5.2 percent reduction by 2012 (hardly the levels we need to reach, but a step in the right direction), but somehow we seemed to think that even that was too strenuous.
  • We really are lucky that the ozone hole forms over the South Pole and not they North. At the moment, it only really effects the very bottom of South America (southern Chile and Argentina), so luckily very few people are affected. If it was over the north Pole, it'd cover most of Northern Europe and Canada, and tens of millions of people. A frightening idea, really. Would everyone have to stay indoors for four months at a time?
  • Greenhouse gasses and the ozone hole are unrelated. The ozone hole is caused (mainly) by CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons, a type of gas that used to be used in spraycans and refridgerators), which are a catalyst for the decomposition of ozone. It should be noted that the CFCs don't actually get used up in this reaction, so they go on and on breaking down ozone. The halflife of the CFCs in question in the atmosphere is about a century, so it isn't going to go away after just a few sunny afternoons.