The Hole Story: A Penguin's Nemesis

by Tamsin Gray     Department: Earth

Antarctic legend will have you believe that penguins are sucked out of the ozone hole and up into outer space. Thankfully for our feathered friends, it's not what's going out of the hole but what's coming in - i.e. oodles of harmful UV radiation - that we need to worry about.

Here's a satellite picture of the ozone hole  (the blacks, purples and darker blues show areas of serious ozone depletion). It stretches over most of Antarctica and sometimes as far as the tip of South America.



Test your knowledge and find out more about how the ozone hole forms.

If you think the hole in the ozone layer is old news, or that it won't affect you - think again. Latest predictions are that it won't have recovered fully until at least 2070. As ozone from other areas of the globe moves to fill in the hole, levels of UV are rising everywhere. Even though the release of  the CFC gases responsible for the hole has slowed down dramatically following the highly successful Montreal Protocol, they hang around in the atmosphere for a long time.

So the good news is that things should get better. The bad news? Unfortunately the battle is not over yet. Recent climate change may well add a twist. 

Increasing quantities of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are trapping more and more heat below them, causing global warming for us but high up in the atmosphere it's a different story. With more heat trapped down below it makes sense that the atmosphere higher up cools down.  That's exactly what's been happening at the level of the ozone layer and things are due to get worse. Since the colder it gets the more ozone is destroyed, it turns out climate change is perpetuating the hole in the ozone layer!

Tags: atmosphere, climate change, greenhouse gases, Ozone hole, UV