SIGHTINGS



Ozone Hole Caused By Solar
Wind - Not By Humans
www.insidechina.com
6-21-99


 
BEIJING (Agence France Presse) - The hole in the ozone layer in the South Pole is due to the Sun not people according to research by a Chinese scientist, Xinhua news agency said Sunday.
 
Yang Xuexiang, a professor of geological sciences at Changchun University of Technology, believes the damage is caused by solar winds, a current of high-energy particles, rather than the use of freon, the official news agency said.
 
Yang, who is engaged in research into the evolution of the earth and the changes in the global climate, published his research in an article in the May Chinese edition of the US-based Scientific American magazine, it said.
 
He argues the solar wind has made the atmosphere at the South Pole thinner.
 
The eruption of volcanoes in the southern hemisphere has then released large amounts of harmful gas, which damaged the ozone layer there.
 
The third factor is that the solar high-energy particle currents consume ozone both at the South Pole and the North Pole when they enter the earth's atmosphere.
 
British scientists discovered a huge "ozone hole" above the South Pole in 1985, and most scientists worldwide believe it is the use of freon by man that has sharply reduced the ozone volume.
 
Yang argues the northern hemisphere is where the use of freon is concentrated and so if the freon theory was correct, the ozone hole should have appeared above the North Pole instead of the South Pole, Xinhua said.
 
He said, most planets, including the Earth, may lose part of their mass when they move toward the Sun. This lays the foundation for the evolution of atmospheres on planets.
 
For instance, he said, planets near the Sun, such as Mercury, have very thin atmospheres, while planets far from the Sun have much thicker atmospheres.
 
As the earth's atmosphere is protected by the geomagnetic layer, only a small amount of the solar high-energy particles can penetrate it and reach the South and North poles along the lines of magnetic force.
 
So the ozone layers at the two poles were the first to be destroyed, he argued.
 
According to his calculations, the solar 6.6 percent more particles accumulate at the South Pole than the North annually, giving rise to the gradual enlargement of the ozone hole there.
 
The solar high-energy particles may consume 10 percent of the ozone volume of the Earth each year and the ozone hole is moving from the South Pole to the North Pole and should reach there in about 10,000 years, he said.
 
 



Comment

By Rupert Chappelle rupert@pooky.myhouse.com

6-24-99

Note - Mr. Chappelle does not claim to be a scientist and offers this only as a 'common sense theory' with no specific data to back it up.

Ten years ago i figured out what the ozone problem really was about - at least my theory:

For the last hundred years, the atmosphere has effectively been "mined" of a considerable bit of oxygen in order to make new materials and compunds.

Although the atmosphere is inconcievably vast and it is hard to imagine that enough oxygen could be removed to make a difference, the percentage of atmosphere which is at the altitude of the ozone layer is very small and even a removal of a fraction of a percent of oxygen will result in much less available oxygen where the ozone layer is produced.

The ozone layer is lacking because the material from which it is made is lacking.

If it were only the effect of cfc's, then the lessening of the ozone layer would result in more uv radiation going deeper into the atmosphere resulting in the production of more ozone producing in effect a feedback loop that would self regulate the amount of ozone.

And now for an ascii diagram:

. = oxygen - lets call each dot 2 lbs per square inch so that at ground level we have 16 pounds per square inch

  normal remove 2 units
High altitude .  
ozone layer .. .
  ... ...
  .... ....
medium altitude ..... .....
  ...... ......
low altitude ....... .......
ground ........ ........

let's call it 36 units.    remove 2 units

You can see that by removing only two units in this diagram results in 1/3 the oxygen needed to maintain the ozone layer.

Now, this is a linear representation but the actual scale would be curved - a log scale:

. =1/4 pound per square inch

ozone layer .
  ..
  ....
medium altitude ........
  ................
low altitude .................................
ground ................................................................

Now it is clear that removal of a very small number at the bottom of the scale would have very much more significant effects at the top of the scale. If we remove less than one percent the top layer is gone. In reality, the percentage required to produce a significant effect would be much smaller.

Of course, none of this is to scale.

I'm sure that NOAA knows about it, but what can they do? Tell the chemical companies to stop making plastics and other new materials? I wouldn't hold my breath on that one.

How do you figure something like this out? When you put a straw in a beverage and suck some fluid up from the bottom of the glass the fluid amount is reduced at the top of the glass, not the bottom. It is just that simple - no wonder they want to blame it on something esoteric and imcomprehensible to the average person.

Now there is a story which suggests a "why" for this in the three-fisted tales of bob . . .

Has the sun changed that much since we have first studied it, or, for that matter, during the span that life has been on the planet? And if so, would not life have adapted to this? I don't buy the solar culprit on this one.