Scientists say the hole in the Earth’s protective ozone layer over the Southern Hemisphere is larger than usual this year and already surpasses the size of Antarctica.
The European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service said Thursday that the so-called ozone hole, which appears every year during the Southern Hemisphere spring, has grown considerably in the past week following an average start.
“Forecasts show that this year´s hole has evolved into a rather larger than usual one,” said Vincent-Henri Peuch, who heads the EU's satellite monitoring service.
“We are looking at a quite big and potentially also deep ozone hole,” he said.
Atmospheric ozone absorbs ultraviolet light coming from the sun. Its absence means more of this high-energy radiation reaches the Earth, where it can harm living cells.
Peuch noted that last year's ozone hole also started out unremarkably but then turned into one of the longest-lasting ones on record.
The Montreal Protocol, signed in 1987, led to a ban on a group of chemicals called halocarbons that were blamed for exacerbating the annual ozone hole.
Experts say that while the ozone layer is beginning to recover, it's likely to take until the 2060s for the ozone-depleting substances used in refrigerants and spray cans to completely disappear from the atmosphere.
A 7.2 magnitude earthquake was reported in Alaska over the weekend, leading to a brief tsunami warning.
Over 11 million Americans are under a heat advisory, with the extreme weather hitting the southern U.S.
Temperatures in central and southern California could hit 120 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend.
The World Health Organization moved to classify aspartame, the artificial sweetener in diet soda, as a possible carcinogen.
The World Health Organization's cancer agency has deemed the sweetener aspartame — found in diet soda and countless other foods — as a “possible” cause of cancer, while a separate expert group looking at the same evidence said it still considers the sugar substitute safe in limited quantities.
More than a third of Americans were under extreme heat advisories, watches and warnings Thursday as a blistering heat wave that's been baking the nation spread further into California, forcing residents to seek out air conditioning or find other ways to stay cool in triple-digit temperatures.
Tourists in central Athens huddled under mist machines, and zoo animals in Madrid were fed fruit popsicles and chunks of frozen food, as southern Europeans braced for a heat wave Thursday, with a warning of severe conditions coming from the European Union’s space agency.
A new study published in Nature has found that more than 56 percent of the world's oceans have changed color in the past 20 years, and climate change is to blame.
Recently discovered teeth of a two-million-year-old human relative in Africa could give researchers new insight into genetics.
