Wildfire Smoke Destroys Ozone

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https://eos.org/articles/wildfire-smoke-destroys-ozone

By Elise Cutts, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: n the middle of the 20th century, humanity unleashed chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) into the atmosphere. By the 1980s, CFCs had gnawed away at the planet’s ozone shield, endangering safety and health on Earth. Worldwide restrictions and bans have begun to heal the damage, but new results have suggested that increasingly severe wildfires could be stalling progress. Liquid droplets containing wildfire smoke act like tiny reaction chambers for chlorine in the stratosphere, producing reactive forms of the element that degrade ozone over the midlatitudes, researchers reported in Nature. This chemical mechanism had “never been seen before,” said study coauthor and atmospheric scientist Kane Stone of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “This is a completely new chemistry that we’re looking at.” Large wildfires are expected to happen more often as the planet warms, so the new finding has raised concerns that intensifying fires could stall the recovery of the stratospheric ozone layer, which protects Earth’s surface and its inhabitants from harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation....

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