New data revealing significant ozone depletion in the North Pole has sent scientists from all over the world scrambling to discover the cause.
For more than 15 years, the South Pole's plummeting ozone level has been measured annually. Its decline has formed a gaping hole in the stratosphere, allowing cancer-causing radiation to reach the Earth's surface.
Ozone depletion in the North Pole, while only a recent discovery, has mobilized scientists from the U.S., Europe, Japan and Canada to spend the next four months researching the mechanics of ozone loss above the Arctic. NASA will head the project.
"We're basically trying to go back up there and verify that our current theories about how the ozone loss is occurring is in fact the case," said Steve Hipskind, one of the project managers at NASA. "There is such a lack of data in those areas, it's largely an attempt to get a very good data set to try to understand whether these processes that we've been theorizing are correct."
More than 350 scientists, technicians, and support workers will use satellites, planes, balloons and ground-based instruments in an attempt to better understand both the process by which ozone is destroyed in the Arctic, and why its levels have dropped so severely in the past two years.
Many believe that cold winters are to blame for the ozone drop.
Ice crystals, which form as part of polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs), assist the chemical process by which ozone is destroyed. Since 1995, cold weather has allowed those crystals to live longer than usual.
But scientists want to be sure that the drop in ozone levels is an anomaly -- one that can be blamed on an unusually cold period -- rather than a systemic depletion.
Through March of 2000, high-altitude balloons and aircraft will collect data about ozone depletion in the Arctic. A team of international scientists based in Sweden will analyze the information.
Data from the project will be used to verify findings from a future instrument called SAGE III, which will study the structure of the ozone layer above the Arctic. SAGE III is scheduled to launch aboard a Russian satellite in 2000.
According to NASA, the field campaign, called SOLVE (SAGE III Ozone Loss and Validation Experiment), will be the largest ever conducted to measure ozone levels and changes in the stratosphere above the North Pole.
The ozone research endeavors are part of an ongoing series of campaigns run by NASA begun in 1987 to monitor, record and learn more about ozone depletion.
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