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Scientists claim to have discovered a massive ozone hole above the tropics, alarming experts

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The lower stratosphere over the tropics has a significant ozone hole that can have an impact on 50% of the world’s population. According to an article published in AIP Advances, they claimed that the hole is seven times larger than the Antarctic ozone hole, which only appears in the spring.

Professor Qing-Bin Lu of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, claims in his research that this brand-new ozone hole has been since the 1980s and, unlike the Antarctic one, is perpetually present.

The scientist has issued a dire warning that the existence of this new hole could have catastrophic effects on Earthly life.

In a press release, Lu stated that “the tropics make up half of the planet’s surface area and are home to about half of the world’s people.”

The existence of the tropical ozone hole could be extremely worrying for the entire world.

The Equator and portions of North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia are all considered to be tropical zones on Earth.

Technically speaking, an “ozone hole” is not a place where there is no ozone; rather, it is an area where the ozone layer is extremely depleted.

Another form of solar energy that is hazardous to people, animals, and plants is ultraviolet radiation, which is absorbed by ozone in the upper atmosphere.

Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and halons—gases historically present in aerosol spray cans and refrigerants—cause ozone depletion when they are discharged into the atmosphere.

According to Lu, the loss of the ozone layer can result in an increase in ground-level UV radiation, which can harm delicate aquatic organisms and ecosystems as well as impair human immune systems and increase the risk of skin cancer and cataracts in people.

Lu and his team looked at average annual ozone changes, variations in annual ozone climatology, and temperature changes over the previous few decades to find this most recent hole.

Other scientists, whose standard photochemical modeling did not reveal the significant gap, were shocked by his findings.

Dr. Marta Abalos Alvarez, a researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid’s (UCM) department of physics of the earth and astronomy, said:

“The article, in my judgment, lacks the scientific rigor required to constitute a credible contribution. It contains a lot of reasoning that is riddled with major mistakes and unsupported claims that are meant to invalidate earlier findings. The acceleration of the Brewer-Dobson circulation is the fundamental cause of the long-standing problem of ozone depletion in the tropics. The journal where it was published has an extremely low impact factor, as a final point.

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