The Ozone Layer Was Damaged By Australia’s Black Summer Megafires

Australia’s record-breaking wildfires of 2019 and 2020 blasted smoke so high that even the ozone layer in the stratosphere was damaged, a new analysis shows.

The Black Summer bushfires, which raged along Australia’s east coast from November 2019 to January 2020, caused unprecedented destruction. The fires burned more than 70,000 square kilometres of bushland, destroyed more than 3000 homes, and killed more than 30 people and billions of animals. Smoke billowed all the way to South America and triggered distant ocean algal blooms. Now, Peter Bernath at Old Dominion University in Virginia and his colleagues have shown that the smoke also pushed its way up into the stratosphere and triggered chemical reactions that destroyed ozone. They analysed data from the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment satellite, which monitors levels of 44 different molecules in the atmosphere. This revealed that stratospheric ozone declined by 13 per cent in the middle latitude area of the southern hemisphere — which includes Australia — in the aftermath of the Black Summer fires.