ozone

Despite all the talk about carbon capture, carbon footprints and carbon trading, carbon dioxide only causes nine to 26 percent of the greenhouse effect. That means that the majority of warming results from gases with a much lower media profile than the paparazzi-trailed starlet of global warming, CO₂. In honor of last weeks’ report in the Journal of Geophysical Research, which identified a brand new greenhouse gas, PopSci.com counts down the gases that bring us bikini weather in Antarctica and beachfront property in Montana.

The good news is that the ozone hole over Antarctica is slowly healing, thanks to controls on ozone-depleting substances that were once widely used in products such as refrigerators and aerosol cans. Stratospheric ozone protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation that can cause problems such as skin cancer and crop damage.

For all the problems greasy hair might bring, there's at least once upside: lessened exposure to ozone. In a decidedly odd, though fruitful study, University of Missouri researchers Glenn Morrison and Lakshmi Pandrangi measured the ozone levels surrounding samples of washed and unwashed hair over the course of a day. Dirty hair absorbed seven times the amount of ozone.

In 1974, chemists F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina warned that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), widely used as refrigerants, were destroying the ozone layer.

Using a spectrometer, British researchers discovered the ozone hole in the lower stratosphere over Antarctica in the mid-1980s.




The hole swells and contracts; it grew largest in Sept. 2000, spanning about 17.5 million square miles.