Ozone Hole Gapes Wider

There was more grim news last week about the ozone layer, which wards off the sun’s deadliest radiation. A U.N. advisory panel reported that serious atmospheric ozone depletion has spread from the polar regions to temperate climes — and is worse than anyone thought. In the past decade the amount of ozone over the continental U.S. has decreased between 4% and 8%. Scientists knew that man-made chlorofluorocarbons caused some ozone loss in the temperate zones during winter and early spring, but now there also seem to be “significant” decreases in summer when people expose the most skin for the greatest amount of time. Even before last week’s report, the Environmental Protection Agency projected that ozone loss would cause 200,000 additional skin-cancer deaths in the U.S. over the next 50 years.