Antarctic ozone hole shows signs of repair

[C C]

http://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i27/Antar...signs.html

EXCERPT: For the first time, scientists report that the protective ozone layer over Antarctica is showing signs of healing (Science 2016, DOI: 10.1126/science.aae0061). In 1987, the international Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer began restricting the use of halocarbons such as refrigerants, solvents, and aerosol-can propellants, which react with and destroy ozone. Now, almost 30 years later, Susan Solomon, atmospheric chemistry and climate science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues provide both experimental and modeling evidence that ozone levels are actually increasing, a sign of true “healing....”

[Magical Realist]

“Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika