It's one of the biggest ozone holes on record — but not necessarily cause for alarm.
      • GreenMario@lemm.eeEnglish
        27·
        1 year ago

        I was told it was fixed. WTF?

        Like the ozone thing was the last time humanity came together and fixed a problem instead saying it was a LiBrUl oZone hole.

        • TheFriar@lemm.eeEnglish
          18·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, that’s what I heard too. And it was because of CFC’s and wasn’t related to climate change. Once CFCs were outlawed, I heard the hole in the ozone was fixing itself (and ultimately fixed).

          • Zron@lemmy.worldEnglish
            16·
            1 year ago

            Seen a lot of “trades” videos out of china with refrigerant cylinders in the back that look suspiciously like R-12 and R-22 cylinders.

            You know, the refrigerants that were eating into the ozone layer.

              • Zron@lemmy.worldEnglish
                3·
                1 year ago

                They signed the Montreal protocol, which is what banned cfcs internationally.

                But that doesn’t stop them from either using existing stockpiles, although I don’t know how they still have a significant amount of either, or ignoring the treaty altogether.

                CFCs are actually amazing refrigerants. They are low pressure and were fairly cheap to manufacture compared to modern refrigerants. The low pressure is nice, because it means the systems that work with those don’t need to be designed to withstand 400+ psi like you need for 410a for example. That also means installers on lower pressure systems only need to soft solder joints most of the time, instead of brazing the lines together. That’s the only reasons I can think of that they’d still be using damn CFCs.

        • Mongostein@lemmy.caEnglish
          10·
          1 year ago

          That was the hole above California. This hole is above Antarctica, apparently caused by emissions drifting from China.

    • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      Brazil

      • Area: 8,515,767 km² (3,287,956 sq mi)
      • (sauce)

       

      Capybara

      • Adult capybaras grow to 106 to 134 cm
      • (sauce)

      Taking the average for length (120 cm). The width of a capybara is surprisingly absent from the internet, so I had to improvise by counting pixels:

      Finding a clean top-down photo was also surprisingly difficult, but I chose this one because it’s laying fairly straight, and there’s a visible prominence of its hip bone and spine. I don’t want to count fur-fluff in the width, so multiplying the hip to spine count by two gets us a hip-to-hip count of 56 pixels, which is 0.209% of its 268 pixel length. Multiplying wiki’s length average by 0.209 gets us a width of: 25.08 cm, x 120 cm gives us an area of 3,009.6 cm² (3.24 sq ft), or to make our units the same, 0.030096 km²

      8,515,767 km² (Brazil) / 0.030096 km² (capybara) = 282,953,448.96 capybaras per Brazil

      x 3 = 848,860,346.88 capybaras per 1 antarctic ozone hole!

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Observations from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite indicate the ozone hole reached approximately 10 million square miles (26 million square kilometers) in area on Sept. 16, 2023 — making it one of the largest seasonal holes ever observed.

    Ozone is a naturally occurring gas, and there’s a layer of it in the stratosphere that protects us from the sun’s ultraviolet, or UV, rays.

    The ozone hole still grows and shrinks seasonally, however, due to temperature changes and wind conditions in the stratosphere, reaching a maximum between mid-September and mid-October.

    One possible reason for the higher-than-normal growth is the Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption in January 2022, which introduced massive quantities of water vapor into the air.

    “The water vapor could have led to the heightened formation of polar stratospheric clouds, where chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) can react and accelerate ozone depletion," said Inness.

    “Based on the Montreal Protocol and the decrease of anthropogenic ozone-depleting substances, scientists currently predict that the global ozone layer will reach its normal state again by around 2050,” said Claus Zehner, ESA’s mission manager for Copernicus Sentinel-5P.

    The original article contains 340 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 47%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!