According to a recent study published in Nature, an Australian wildfire that raged through southeast Australia in 2019–20 released chemicals that broadened the ozone layer. The study warned that the smoke from such fires could damage the Earth’s protection against the Sun’s UV radiation.
From December 2019 to January 2020, the wildfire burned, killing 36 people and injuring over three billion others. Almost a million tonnes of smoke were thrown into the atmosphere, covering millions of acres.
According to a study released last week, the smoke produced by Australia’s most destructive fire on record reached heights of up to 30 kilometres.
According to the study’s co-author Kane Stone, an atmospheric chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, this region of the stratosphere is where the ozone layer is located.
The study’s researchers also discovered a brand-new chemical process by which smoke particles exacerbated ozone depletion.
The effects were so severe that regions beneath Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Africa and South America lost three to five per cent of their ozone layer.
The study is based on the examination of satellite data, which showed that the levels of hydrochloric acid in areas of the atmosphere far from the South Pole were unusually low when compared to past years.
This is harmless to the ozone layer residual chlorine that chlorofluorocarbons leave behind. Hydrochloric acid, however, produces ozone-depleting molecules when it dissolves in water droplets.
Due to the excessively warm air around the poles, this phenomenon is typically not observable. Yet, the satellite data demonstrated how different organic acids included in smoke particles affected hydrochloric acid’s solubility following the fires.
Susan Solomon, a different research co-author, claimed that the hydrochloric acid and smoke particles formed molecular chlorine, which disintegrated into extremely reactive “ozone-eating” chlorine atoms.
“Wildfire smoke at warm temperatures does things over Australia that couldn’t otherwise happen,” Solomon said in the study.
“There’s now sort of a race against time. Hopefully, chlorine-containing compounds will have been destroyed before the frequency of fires increases with climate change. This is all the more reason to be vigilant about global warming and these chlorine-containing compounds,” she informed.