Astrum Space - The New Threat to the Ozone Layer | Astrum Earth

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

You might have heard of the hole in the ozone layer. In the 1980s, it caused a global panic. But why does no one talk about it anymore? Did we actually fix the hole in our atmosphere? In this video, we’ll uncover the truth, and discover the new threats to Earth’s ozone this century. ▀▀▀▀▀▀Want to restore the planet’s ecosystems and see your impact in monthly videos? The first 100 people to join Planet Wild with my code ASTRUM8 will get the first month paid for by me: https://planetwild.com/r/astrumearth/.... ▀▀▀▀▀▀Astrum's newsletter has launched! Want to know what's happening in space? Sign up here: ⁠https://astrumspace.kit.com⁠A huge thanks to our Patreons who help make these videos possible. Sign-up here: ⁠https://bit.ly/4aiJZNF

The first ever all-electric 2026 Subaru Trail Seeker is the EV for the Trail Obsessed. With up to 444 kilometers on a full charge and DC fast charging from 10 to 80% in about 30 minutes in ideal conditions. Plus, ample ground clearance and symmetrical all-wheel drive make the 2026 Trail Seeker the most capable EV Subaru has ever built. Test drive it at your local Subaru dealer or visit Subaru.ca. In the late 1980s, there was only one thing everyone was talking about. It wasn't Madonna's latest single, leg warmers, shoulder pads or even big hair. It was ozone. Or more precisely, a vast, hulking great hole that had opened up in our planet's life support

system, the ozone layer. And the culprit? Supervillain gases known as chloro-fluorocarbons, or CFCs, found in everything from fridges to deodorants, and they were destroying the precious ozone in the stratosphere. By the late 80s the hole was reaching sizes of around 22 million square kilometers. By 2040 the hole would have gone global. By 2050, the ozone layer could have collapsed entirely. Harmful UV radiation would come flooding through, causing huge increases in skin cancer, cataracts and compromised immune systems. Plants and crops would be failing. The word uninhabitable was being used in

by leading scientists. Before climate change, this was the greatest environmental apocalypse of our age. And yet, we don't seem to talk about it anymore. Is it because we actually fixed it? I'm James Stewart and you're watching Astrum Earth. Join me in this video as we discover the truth about the hole in the ozone layer. We'll get to the bottom of what it is, why it's there and how humanity managed to fix it. And I'll explain why we might not be out of the woods.

just yet. For those of you that might be late to this ozone party, and even for those of you that aren't, it's worth going back to the basics to start things off. What actually is the ozone layer? Well, Earth's atmosphere is like a jacket, or several jackets for our planet. There are five main layers. The bit we're most familiar with is the troposphere. This is where we live.

The troposphere starts on Earth's surface and extends up to around 20 kilometres. This actually varies depending on where you're standing, And no, I don't mean like on a mountain. It's around 18 to 20 kilometres at the equator, but only 6 kilometres at the poles. The troposphere is a hard-working layer. It provides the air we breathe, contains 99% of the atmosphere's water, and is where you'll find pretty much all of our weather. As you climb, the air gets thinner and colder.

Next up is the stratosphere, which extends from around 6 to 50 kilometres above the Earth's surface. The only clouds that usually venture this high are cumulonimbus thunder clouds, whose tops just scrape the lowest part of the stratosphere, which is why they've got their distinctive anvil-shaped caps. They're sort of squashed against the ceiling of the atmospheric boundary. Commercial passenger jets fly in the lower stratosphere, trying to stay above the weather for a smoother ride. In the troposphere, temperatures fall as you climb, but in the stratosphere, they actually increase with altitude. and there's a reason for this and it's actually the reason you're watching this video. This is where the ozone layer is. Beyond that is the mesosphere, the thermosphere and the exosphere, and past that,

well, that's space. And we've actually got a whole other channel for space, so if that's your thing, why not check it out after this video? Anyway, back to ozone. Every layer of the atmosphere has a specific job to do, and the ozone layer is possibly the most important of them all. But to understand why that is, we need to understand a bit more about what this vital layer is actually made of. We're all familiar with oxygen.

O2, it's what we're all breathing in right now. Well, ozone is O3. That's three oxygen atoms combined to form a pale blue gas. You know that sort of sharp, fresh smell you often get just after a thunderstorm? Well, that, that is ozone. Ozone can be both a hero and a villain. And whether it's good or bad depends on where it is. Bad ozone is tropospheric or ground level. It's a harmful air pollutant and often the main

ingredient in smog. But good ozone is stratospheric. It hangs out around 15 to 35 kilometers above the Earth's surface and basically acts like a sunscreen for the planet. This is the ozone there we've all heard of and it blocks an incredible 98% of all harmful UV radiation. Yeah, 98% it works hard. The vast majority of sunlight is what's known as visible light, the light we can see, with wavelengths of 400 to 700 nanometers. Ultraviolet radiation is actually only 8% of all light and it's invisible to the human eye, though some insects like bumblebees can see it. Visible light consists of different colours that you can see in a rainbow, and UV is no different.

It also has its own spectrum, UVA, UVB and UVC. They're classified by wavelengths, so UVA is the longest. and UVC is the shortest. You may have even seen UVA and UVB on sunscreen labels. They're what causes sunburn and can cause skin cancer. UVB and UVC are not only incredibly damaging to us, but they mess with all sorts of stuff, including photosynthesis and the productivity in plants and crops.

They damage DNA, suppress immune systems, and can even reduce survival rates. In fact, UVC radiation is used to disinfect hospitals. The reason being is, because it can quite literally kill nearly everything. And here's where the ozone layer comes in because it screens all of the most harmful UVC radiation and the vast majority of UVB.

Quite simply, without it, the radiation would literally sterilize the Earth's surface. But here's the thing. Ozone is what's known as a trace gas. That means there's not a lot of it, basically. In fact, even in the stratosphere, ozone concentration is only about 15 parts per million. If you took all the ozone in the world and spread it across the earth surface like a kind of ozone-y jam, it would form a layer only three millimeters thick. That's the same as two tiny pennies.

And if you did that same thing with the rest of the atmosphere, that atmospheric jam would be 8 kilometers high and very sticky. So what happens when you discover some of that precious ozone is missing? This animation on your screen shows the actual hole in our ozone layer. tracked over two decades. The blue and purple marked the area with the least ozone. Now, technically this isn't a hole, I know in shape. It's a region of exceptionally depleted ozone. But hole was snappier and more importantly, more concerning to the general public.

Now, in 1979, there was no significant hole at all. And then it just grew and grew and grew and grew covering not just Antarctica, but occasionally stretching as far as South America or even New Zealand. By the year 2000, it measured 28.4 million square kilometers, almost seven times the size of the EU, or three times the size of the United States. Looking back with hindsight, it seems pretty obvious that this was a planetary scale emergency. But how did we even realise we had a problem in the first place? The answer, as with so many things, is science.

We first started measuring ozone to try and understand more. about how our atmosphere worked. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, scientists had already established that stratospheric ozone acted as a vital shield against harmful radiation. In the mid-1920s, Gordon Dobson, a British scientist, invented a new type of spectrophotometer, an instrument that monitors UV levels from the ground to work out how much ozone there is in the stratosphere. More than a century later and the Dobson spectrophotometer is still the foundation of the global network for monitoring atmospheric ozone even today. In fact, what are known as Dobson units are now the gold standard for monitoring the ozone hole. So 300 Dobson units is the ideal amount of

ozone. It's what gives us that metaphorical three millimeter layer I mentioned before. Less than that and you're in trouble. And we started spotting signs of exactly that kind of trouble in the 1970s and the 1980s. British Antarctic survey scientists Joe Farman, Brian Gardnery and John Shanklin took the world by storm when their groundbreaking paper, large losses of total ozone in Antarctica published in nature in 1985. Working through a backlog of data from the Dobson Spectrophotometer and the Haley base in Antarctica,

Shanklin discovered a systematic and rapid decline in the amount of springtime ozone. In 1979, it was relatively fine, but by 1984, the stratospheric ozone layer over the Haley base was only around two-thirds as thick as in previous decades. Something was happening to our ozone, and it was happening fast. Between 1986 and 1987, the race was on to find out what exactly was causing. the loss. Scientists from the hunt for ozone-depleting substances, or ODS. The BAS team had theorised that possible chemical causes must be considered, and they weren't the first. If you've heard of the ozone hole, then you'll already like, you know, that chloro-florocarbons or CFCs were eventually found out to be the culprits, but they simply weren't in the public consciousness back then. They

were an invisible part of our daily lives using aerosols and fridges, a sort of killer lying in darkness waiting. The first ever, all-electric 2026 Subaru Trail Seeker is the EV for the trail obsessed. With up to 444 kilometers on a full charge and DC fast charging from 10 to

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and they were denounced as scaremongers. Their work was literally called pure science fiction. As a side note, and I do quite enjoy this, Melina and Roland were later awarded the Nobel Prize in 1995 for chemistry, so they did win in the end. Anyway, in 1986, Susan Solomon, a research at NOAA led a team to McMurdo Base to find out exactly what was going on. See, Solomon had theorised that if CFCs were responsible for ozone depletion, then there will be high levels of chlorine oxide radicals in the stratosphere. And guess what? There were.

Melina and Roland had been right all along. So yes, there was a hole. And yes, it was caused by humans. Shock. But one question still remained. how exactly did CFCs do all of this? Before we get into the chemistry, if like me you're quite enjoying a rather more positive climate news story for once and you fancy some more like this, well then I've got more good news.

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Let's do some chemistry, shall we? So ozone is produced when oxygen molecules absorb UV light from the sun and split into two single atoms. One then reacts with an oxygen molecule to become O3. Now ozone is pretty unstable. If you add a bit more sunshine, it can split back into O2 with one lonely oxygen atom left sort of spare, allowing the cycle to begin all over again. like a self-replicating planetary sunscreen whenever you need it.

Until you throw some chloro-florocarbons into the mix, then things get messy. CFCs are one of those things us humans thought we were inventing to make life better, easier and cheaper. They first popped up in the 1890s and came into widespread use in the 1930s, primarily used as coolants in refrigerators and air conditioners to replace toxic gases like ammonia and methyl. chloride. They were also pretty effective in aerosols like deodorant and hairspray, making perfect propellants in the pressurized cans. It's important to remember when we look back at these things and obviously hindsight's a beautiful thing, that at the time, CFCs were considered perfectly safe. They were wonder chemicals to some, non-toxic, non-flammable and stable. CFCs are halogeno-alcanes,

which are molecules consisting of carbon, fluorine and chlorine atoms. The carbon-chlorine bond is long and relatively weak. Now, these molecules can float up into the stratosphere, where the UV rays from the sun provide enough energy to break that carbon-chlorine bond. Bonds like the one between carbon and chlorine are called covalent bonds, and they consist of two electrons. When it breaks, one of those electrons goes to the carbon and one to the chlorine, giving them an unpaired electron each. Species like these are called free radicals, and they are very very very. They are very very reactive. When one of these chlorine radicals collides with an ozone molecule, it breaks one of its oxygen-oxygen bonds, creating oxygen and a chlorine monoxide radical, C-L-O. This can react with another ozone molecule,

producing oxygen and another chlorine radical, which goes on to react with more and more and more and more. In fact, just one chlorine radical can break down more than 100,000 ozone molecules into oxygen. Now, given it's necessary for life on our planet, you could be forgiven for thinking that more oxygen would be a good thing, right? Well, it's good if you're on Earth's surface and you need to breathe, but it's not so good in the stratosphere. We'd rather have the ozone keeping those UV rays at bay. The ozone-munching-munching part of this story is one most people already know. But what most people don't realize is that while chlorine radicals do ultimately destroy ozone, they don't necessarily do it immediately. They require a very special set of conditions.

And this, well, this is where Antarctica comes in. You may have noticed that the hole in all of these satellite images is always mostly over Antarctica. And there's a very good reason for that. Antarctica is the highest, driest, windiest and coldest place on Earth. It's a continent with no countries and no permanent population to speak of. And I should count the penguins, which I do. So this can't be CFC ground zero. how many penguins using fridges and air conditioners and hairsprays?

Well, here's what's happening. The Earth's atmosphere is continuously being stirred by winds, so ozone-depleting gases could end up anywhere. 90% of CFCs and halons, their bromine equivalents, have been released in the Northern Hemisphere, Europe, Russia, Japan, and North America. They rise up to the stratosphere in the tropics, and they are then blown polewards. And as we mentioned, Antarctica is cold. Very cold. In the long months of winter darkness, a whirlpool of winds called the polar vortex traps super cold air over this region, allowing the formation of polar stratospheric clouds. Now, these clouds are perfect for CFCs to start breaking down into those chlorine radicals. When the sunlight returns in the Antarctic spring, that chlorine that's been building up all winter starts to kick into gear, shredding through the ozone at an incredible rate.

The hole just keeps growing bigger and bigger and bigger until it stabilises with the weakening of the polar vortex as summer arrives. And then next year, the cycle begins again. This is why the hole is seasonal and that is why it's nearly always over Antarctica. But just because it's all the way over there in Antarctica on a largely uninhabited continent doesn't make the ozone hole any less dangerous. It just means it's further away. Plus, what are called finger extensions can shift and expand the hole over cities in New Zealand and South America. I mean, back in 2000, residents of Puente Arenes in Chile were warned to stay at home during one of the largest seasonal ozone holes on record. UV levels had skyrocketed into the danger zone.

Quite simply, without action, this hole would have kept growing, not just over Antarctica, but everywhere. The warnings were stark. By 2040, the whole would have gone global. By 2065, the UV index in the US would be 30. Usually it's just 9. Strong enough to cause sunburn in cities like Washington, D.C. in just five minutes. DNA mutating UV radiation would be up 500%. There would be more cancers, more cataracts, more compromised immune systems.

Plants, animals and crops would struggle. Entire ecosystems would collapse. And it wasn't just harmful UV radiation that was the problem. By the late 1980s, scientists were already seeing wide-ranging climate impacts. Jet streams were changing. Australia got dry while parts of Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina got more rain. The nature of the chain reactions meant that our atmosphere was already loaded with decades of CFCs yet to even make their impact. CFCs have a long atmospheric lifespan.

They can hang around in the stratosphere causing trouble way after they were used down on the surface. CFC 11s can last 55 years and CFC 12's 140 years. Something needed to be done and quickly. And surprisingly, well it was. For once, the entire world quite literally came together to act. And it worked. In 1987, 197 UN member states adopted the Monterey or to give it its full title, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that depletes the ozone layer. How grand. It was the only UN treaty ever to be ratified by every single country on the planet. This landmark global agreement introduced a plan for phasing out and eventually banning CFCs,

with other ozone depleting substances like HFCs or hydrofluorocarbons being added as they were discovered. Montreal was a real turning point, a plan to save the ozone layer. And guess what? All these decades later, it's still working. CFC emissions have fallen by an incredible 99% since the Montreal Protocol was implemented. And ozone depleting substances in the stratosphere? Well, they're falling too. Since peaking around the year 2000, levels have declined by about a third

relative to pre-ozoan hole levels. Yeah, as you probably already guessed by now, things had to get worse before they got better. All of those chemical reactions were baked into the system, but it could have been a whole lot worse. And this is where it becomes a proper good news story. Because the ozone layer hasn't just stopped growing, it's actually started healing. The Antarctic ozone hole has been slowly improving in area and depth, if you remember those Dobson units, since the turn of the millennium.

Now, four recovery is still decades away, but it's tantalizingly within reach. It's predicted we'll see a return to 1980 values by 2040 for the global average. That stretches to 2045 for the Arctic and 266 in the Antarctic, because yeah, those Polish stratospheric clouds, will they really make a difference? A recent MIT-led study published in the journal Nature added the cherry on top of the cake. Ozone layer recovery has been observed in the past, but this, well, this is the first study to confirm healing as a direct result of global. actions rather than natural influences like weather. The team borrowed what are known as fingerprinting techniques from climate science, matching the specific pattern of ozone changes across different months and altitudes against

what models predict. It helped researchers confirm and quantify the role of us fridge buying hairspray using pesky humans. Basically, we broke it and then we fixed it. And this is all obviously great news, but what's more is fixing the hole in the ozone there is even helping us with things like climate change. Another study published in Nature found that if CFCs hadn't been banned in the 1980s, they could have raised average global temperatures by another 2.5 degrees Celsius, which if you've seen this channel, you know we really can't be doing. We can't get complacent, though. In 2025, the ozone hole was only the fifth smallest since 1992, and it was still on average 18.71 million square.

kilometers. That's still twice the size of the contiguous United States. In a cruel twist of irony, climate change isn't helping. Temperature, weather, shifts in the polar vortex, they can all cause ozone depletion. Extreme wildfires can be doubly devastating, producing pyro-cumelonimbus clouds funneling a cocktail of chemical components into the upper atmosphere. Those compounds contain, yep, you've guessed it, chlorine, which reacts with the ozone to break it down again. It's also hard to account for rogue actors who might be ignoring the ban by still using CFCs illegally. In 2017, a crack squad of scientists at Bristol University noticed rising emissions of CFC 11, banned since 2010, and turned detective to trace it back

to China. The factories were eventually shut down and emissions did drop, not just in China, but globally. Someone else had been breaking the rules, but exactly who? still remains a mystery. It's tricky because we all still want to have fridges and aerosols and foam insulation, but they all need some sort of chemical cocktail to make them work. Replacements for CFCs can have their own consequences. For a while, hydrochloroflorocarbons or HCFCs looked like they might do the trick, but they were also found to destroy ozone, so they too had to be phased out. Then HFCs came along, but they were a potent greenhouse gas, so they're out too. Hydrofluorolyphins, aka HFOs, were mooted as an alternative, but they have another

side effect in the formation of a forever chemical trifluoroacetic acid. You might have heard of it as Pfas, a poly or per fluorinated substance that will never, ever, ever break down and is ringing alarm bells all around the world for human and environmental health, and quite rightly so. Now, looming over all of this is the meteoric rise of nitrous oxide, commonly known as laughing gas, but predominantly used in agriculture. In the last four decades, human-caused nitrous oxide emissions have soared by 40%. It's now the most significant ODS, or ozone-depleting substance, that we have, and it's not covered by the Montreal Protocol. In fact, the Montreal Assessment Panel says it's a serious threat for stratospheric ozone.

Good, another one. But this alphabet soup of chemicals isn't the only potential ozone killer out there. To paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton, what goes up must come down. In 1985, the year the ozone hobs actually discovered, there are around 120 successful rocket launches, that satellites, payloads, and a record nine, space, shuttle missions. It was a busy old year for space. Now in 2025, an incredible 4,510 objects were also launched into space, overtaking the previous record in 2023 of 2,903. There's currently around 15,000 satellites orbiting the Earth, with another 50,000 set to

join them by 2030. And once they're finished studying the planet or guiding your car GPS system, Often satellites are allowed to fall into the atmosphere and that's a problem. You see what happens when they do that is they burn up on reentry and as they do they release teeny tiny particles of aluminium dioxide and yep you guess it what does aluminium dioxide do depletes the ozone layer. The problem is that the new generation of satellites are extremely short-lived maybe five years so dozens of satellites could be hurtling back to Earth quite literally every day each one potentially destroying the ozone layer we've worked so hard to rebuild back up again. For now though the ozone layer is still healing and I think we have to take that as a win while making sure that these new threats don't undo all of that hard work. The truth is life is complicated and us humans like to complicate it even further. The bottom line is that when you mess with nature you're

always going to pay the price. But on the whole as climate change burns all around us, I'd like to think the healing of the ozone hole is still basically a good news story and sometimes we just need a bit of good news, especially in climate science. One day you're negotiating with suppliers. The next, you're installing a shelf in the back room. Running a business means moving in many directions all the time. TD's new small business banking accounts are built for how your business moves. It's how we're making banking more human. So yes, we fixed the hole in the ozone. That's why we don't really hear about it anymore. But that doesn't mean we should just forget about it.

This cautionary tale is a reminder that each one of our actions has an impact. I mean, who'd have thought a deodorant used in Detroit could end up destroying a vital part of Earth life support system over Antarctica? We could have ignored the warnings, but we didn't. Collective action on a global scale turned the ozone hole into an environmental success story rather than a planetary emergency. This to me is unequivocal proof that science plus public awareness plus crucially political action can equal results.

The only sobering thought is it happened once and it doesn't feel like it's going to happen again. If this same situation was happening now in 2026, would we all rally together in the same way? I'm not convinced. The success of the ozone hole shows what humanity is capable of doing when we all come together for one unified course. cause. My worry is that we don't do that enough. Let me know what you think in the comments

about this ozone situation and whether this is the only time that you can think of as well, that humanities come together for a wider, greater climate good, because I struggle to think of too many examples. Thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next one. Don't forget, before you go, we have that great offer for you with Planet Wild. The first hundred people to sign up using my code get their first month paid for by me. So if this video inspired you, if you want to do something right now to help the planet, please do get involved. Ready to take your investing knowledge to pro-level? This is Fidelity Connects, your daily edge in the markets.

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