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The ozone layer this year has grown exponentially among the largest recorded, signaling that its recovery has been delayed and delayed, according to a study by Copernicus, an EU monitoring program.
A small hole above Antarctica stretched an area of 24m in September, and hit the 27m sq km recorded in 2006. At the top, the size of the hole in 2020 only dropped 24m sq km.
The same measure this year was “within 25 percent of the largest” ever recorded, says Vincent-Henri Peuch, director of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. This does not mean that ozone depletion is “at risk. It simply means that it will take time.”
He could recover completely in 50 years, he said.
Earth’s ozone layer protects the earth from harmful ultraviolet rays, but it is also damaged by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) – long and hardy organisms, commonly found in microscopes and refrigerators, which were banned worldwide in the late 1980’s.
Each year, the hole produces the stratosphere ozone layer during the southern winter, while sunlight triggers ozone and chemical compounds, especially CFCs.
These compounds, composed of chlorine or bromine-containing compounds, appear on a polar stratospheric cloud that forms extremely hot inside the polort vortex during the winter night.
Although these devices do not work in the dark, they do damage the ozone layer when the sun reaches the polar region.
The number of CFCs in the stratosphere does not vary from year to year but has begun to decline, according to Copernicus, as a result of the 1987 Montreal Alliance to ban its use since early 1989.
Natural changes also contribute to the growth of the ozone layer: lower temperatures mean more polar clouds and a stronger vortex, which can produce a larger hole.
Similarly, sudden stratospheric temperatures and instability of the polar vortex may mean that the ozone layer is mixed with extraterrestrial vortex, which reduces their degradation. This happened in 2019, when the ozone layer was much smaller.
“It takes a long time for the atmosphere to clean up,” Peuch said. But the amount of residual matter decreases, the ozone layer becomes smaller “regardless of the annual variation”.
The big holes written two years ago “don’t challenge us to understand how ozone works,” Peuch added.
Seasonal Growth
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