Climate change is having a devastating effect on our world, but there is some surprisingly good environmental news — the hole in the Earth’s ozone layer is shrinking.
In a new NASA report, a team from the Goddard Space Flight Center said the annual Antarctic ozone hole has reached an average area size of 8.9 million square miles between Sept. 7 and Oct. 13, 2022. That’s slightly smaller than last year and continues an ongoing trend, which shows that the hole is shrinking.
“Over time, steady progress is being made, and the hole is getting smaller,” said Paul Newman, chief scientist for Earth sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “We see some wavering as weather changes and other factors make the numbers wiggle slightly from day to day and week to week. But overall, we see it decreasing through the past two decades. The elimination of ozone-depleting substances through the Montreal Protocol is shrinking the hole.”
The Earth’s ozone layer shields life on our planet from harmful radiation from space. But back in the 1980s, humanity ripped a hole in that layer over the South Pole by using an excess amount of chemicals that destroyed the ozone. Since then, scientists around the globe have been working to enact policies that would shrink the hole and allow us to live healthier lives. You can see the change of the ozone layer in the NASA video below.
