Mexico.
In about 20 years the ozone layer could recover completely, according to Mexican scientist Mario Molina, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1995.
In an interview for the Conacyt News Agency about the International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer that was celebrated on September 16, Mario Molina said that in the last century it had been predicted that the ozone layer was going to recover but they did not know how long it would take.
He said that after the Montreal Protocol was signed in 1987, in which nations that manufacture chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) — which damage the ozone layer — pledged to halt production and replace them with other compounds less harmful to the environment, scientists "had predicted that it would be in this century when we were going to we could start to see the ozone layer recover, but we weren't sure how long we had to wait."
In recent weeks, a group of scientists led by Susan Solomon, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), published in the journal Science that the hole in the ozone layer shrank approximately four million square kilometers, an area similar to that of India.
In the year 2000, this hole reached its all-time high by reaching a dimension of 25 million square kilometers, which is more than the extension of Russia.
He explained that the recovery of the ozone layer is a non-linear process. "When the concentration of CFCs has decreased to a certain level, the hole in the ozone layer will gradually become smaller."
He recalled that "chlorofluorocarbons are very stable compounds, that's why they reach the stratosphere." Today the hole we still see is the product of all the CFCs that were emitted last century, it only remains to wait for those particles to disappear little by little so that the layer can regenerate.
Source: Agencia Informativa Conacyt.
