In an age when computers were already replacing many human checks, a handful of scientists in Antarctica were still pointing an old optical instrument toward the Sun. Their readings suggested that the ozone was vanishing, contradicting the more modern satellite systems that were not showing anything unusual. Luckily the team refused to dismiss their data, and their persistence would soon shock the entire World.
For decades, the British Antarctic Survey had measured ozone at Halley Bay as part of routine monitoring. By the early 1980s, most of the world had switched to satellites like NASA’s TOMS, which processed vast amounts of data automatically. but the satellite’s software came with a feature where it rejected any readings below a certain threshold, assuming they were instrument errors, which made it oversight the ozone hole.
Joe Farman and his colleagues Brian Gardiner and Jonathan Shanklin, still using their trusty Dobsons on the ice, saw what the computers had thrown away: a dramatic thinning of the ozone layer every southern spring. When Farman published his findings in Nature in 1985, the reaction was immediate and global. The “ozone hole” over Antarctica was real, a massive seasonal wound in Earth’s protective shield, forcing the world to confront the scale of invisible atmospheric damage.
Within two years, nations united to act. The Montreal Protocol of 1987 began phasing out CFCs, marking one of the most successful environmental agreements in history. Decades later, satellite and ground instruments together confirm that the ozone layer is healing. This story reminds us that maintaining redundancy in our measurements and keeping older methods alive can help us uncover critical problems we might otherwise never see.
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