Word: antarctica
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...believe cause as much as 20 times the damage of CFCs. Scientists estimate that overall as much as 7% of the ozone belt, which stretches six to 30 miles above the earth, has already been destroyed. Moreover, researchers have found evidence of "holes" in the shield, including one above Antarctica that approaches the size of the continental U.S. As the world's ozone layer deteriorates, the sun's radiation could lead to a dramatic increase in skin cancer and cataracts, along with a lowered resistance to infection. It could damage plant life, both directly and as a result...
...months ago, 15 scientists flew into McMurdo Station, Antarctica, to investigate a mystery: What causes a thinning in atmospheric ozone above the frigid continent, a phenomenon that has peaked each October since it was first observed in 1983? It was hardly an academic question; the ozone layer is a blanket of oxygen molecules that protects the earth's surface from the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation, a form of light just beyond the human range of vision. Speculation on the reason for these "holes" has ranged from weather patterns and solar activity to the action of man-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs...
...Antarctica is not the only spot where ozone levels are low, says Donald Heath, a NASA scientist. Tests over Arosa, Switzerland, since the 1920s have shown an average ozone loss of 3%, mostly in the past ten years. And Heath believes he has found another hole. Centered over Spitsbergen, Norway, 700 miles from the North Pole, it is one-third the size of the Antarctic hole. Heath claims the region's ozone loss has been 1.5% a year for the past six years and says this location fits models of CFC-caused loss...
...expedition team had to be airlifted out because of injuries. "It was an exercise of the human spirit that the world needed to see," said Co-Leader Will Steger, 41, who is already planning his next demonstration of human willpower: a 100- day, 2,500-mile dogsled trip across Antarctica...
...Australian novelist (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith), playwright (Bullie's House), screenwriter (Silver City) and movie actor (The Devil's Playground). The subjects of his nearly 20 books are equally protean: Joan of Arc, the U.S. Civil War battle at Antietam, World War I armistice negotiations, exploration in Antarctica. His 1982 volume, Schindler's List, set off a literary tempest: although it told of an actual German businessman who saved some 1,300 Jews from the Nazis, the book was awarded Britain's prestigious Booker McConnell prize for fiction, eligible apparently because Keneally used novelistic techniques of narrative and reconstruction...