Environment: Arctic Trouble

The other shoe had to drop sooner or later. For five years, atmospheric scientists have known that a 3,000-mile hole in the ozone layer develops over Antarctica during the southern spring. The phenomenon is dramatic evidence of ozone loss in the upper atmosphere, caused largely by man-made chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons, which could leave the earth more vulnerable to cancer-inducing rays from the sun. Now, it seems, there is mounting evidence that the Arctic has its own ozone hole, albeit a smaller one. At the American Geophysical Union meeting last week in Baltimore, W.F.J. Evans, an atmospheric physicist with the Canadian Department...

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