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Repair of the ozone hole
Name: J Braciak
Status: Other
Age: N/A
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: N/A
Question:
Is there any way that we can repair the hole in the ozone layer?
Replies:
The best way is simply to let it repair itself. Over time, the natural ozone
cycle will replenish the depleted mass to what we think of as "normal" levels,
but only if there is no interference by ozone-depleting chemical compounds in
the atmosphere. Unfortunately, this poses a serious problem, because due to
the way that our atmosphere is layered, it will take around fifty years before
the CFC's and other ozone depleting chemicals to actually reach the
stratospheric layer where the ozone exists, so even if we stopped their
release, fright now, it will be fifty years before the ozone layer can even
begin to fix itself.
Some people might propose that we produce it down here (ozone is produced any
time you have an electric current running through the air: it is that dry
smell you detect when in a room of copying machines, for instance, or during a
thunderstorm sometimes.) and ship it up to the stratosphere. Unfortunately,
the sheer tonnage of gas that needs to be produced is prohibitively large, and
this is impossible -- the hole would fix itself by
the time we produced that much and figured out a way to get it pumped to the
stratosphere.
Wordsworth
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Update: June 2012
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