• Air

    • Air is the part of Earth's atmosphere that humans breathe. It is essential for all life on earth but we are doing all sorts of bad things to it.

    • Air

  • Recovery of the ozone hole

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  • time until recovery

    • What is ozone?

    The ozone layer absorbs 97–99 percent of the sun's high frequency ultraviolet light, which is potentially damaging to life on Earth. For a number of years we destroyed the ozone layer by the use of so-called CFC-gases.

    25 September 2006:

    The hole over Antarctica extended over 29 million square kilometers - more than Russia and Canada combined - and the total ozone loss was the largest on record. It will not be fully recovered until between 2060 and 2075.

    The ozone-layer is recovering

    Earth’s ozone layer has stopped its rapid decline and is now recovering. The ozone layer is expected to return to its pre-1980 levels around 2050.

    Thanks to one clever decision

    The massive ozone-layer losses in the 1980s were stopped by the banning of CFC-gases. This was a very important decision…

    But it could have gone terribly wrong

    …if CFC-gazes had not been banned, large parts of earth would be virtually uninhabitable by 2065. UV-radiation in Washington, D.C. or southern Germany would be up 650 percent - strong enough to cause sunburn in just five minutes. You can check out this video to know more on ozone.

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