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As suddenly as it was first formed, a record ozone hole It has healed The largest ozone hole ever opened over the Arctic is now closed, after opening earlier this spring.
Scientists monitoring the “unprecedented” hole in the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service (CAMS) Announced The closing last week. Despite coronavirus blockages leading to a significant reduction in the air pollution, the researchers said, the pandemic was probably not the reason for the closure of the ozone hole.
“Actually, COVID19 and the associated locks probably had nothing to do with this,” CAMS tweeted Sunday. “It has been powered by an unusually strong and long-lived polar vortex, and is unrelated to changes in air quality.”
Now that the intense polar vortex has ended, the ozone hole has closed. CAMS said On Monday he doesn’t expect the same conditions to occur next year.
According to recent NASA data, ozone levels over the Arctic hit a record low in March. “Severe” ozone depletion was certainly unusual: 1997 and 2011 are the only other years on record when similar stratospheric depletions occurred in the Arctic.
“While these low levels are rare, they are unprecedented,” the researchers said.
Man-made chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons have been destroying the layer for the past century, causing the famous hole that formed in Antarctica in the 1980s. Experts noted that “unusual weather conditions” are the cause of the hole. newer, leading to industrial chemicals interacting with high-altitude clouds at abnormally low temperatures.
“This year’s low arctic ozone occurs approximately once per decade,” said Paul Newman, chief scientist for Earth Sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a press release. “For the overall health of the ozone layer, this is troubling as ozone levels in the Arctic tend to be high during March and April.”
Earlier this month, scientists from the European Space Agency said the rare hole covered an area about three times larger than Greenland. They expected it to heal as temperatures rose, breaking the Arctic polar vortex and allowing ozone-depleted air to mix with ozone-rich air at lower latitudes.
After signing the Montreal Protocol in 1987, 197 countries agreed to phase out chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons to protect ozone from further damage, which has contributed to a decrease in the size of the hole over Antarctica. Without those regulations, the Arctic ozone hole this year could have posed a threat to human health.
“We don’t know what caused the wave dynamics to be weak this year,” Newman said. “But we do know that if we hadn’t stopped putting chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere because of the Montreal Protocol, the depletion of the Arctic this year would have been much worse.”
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