Scientists may have spotted Antarctica’s ozone hole on the road to recovery, at least a decade sooner than they thought healing would be noticeable.
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In 1989, an international agreement called the Montreal Protocol began phasing out chemicals that have gnawed away at Earth’s protective ozone layer. Most researchers thought it would take until at least 2023 to detect the hole’s slow recovery, but researchers in Australia now claim to have seen ozone ticking upward since the late 1990s.
“The key is to account for large year-to-year fluctuations that have obscured a gradual increase in the long-term evolution of ozone,” says atmospheric scientist Murry Salby of Macquarie University in Sydney. His team published its findings online May 6 in Geophysical Research Letters.