CHEMISTRY NOBEL PRIZES Three win for ozone depletion research

Abstract

The 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three scientists for their research on the chemistry that controls the amount of ozone in the stratosphere. F. Sherwood Rowland, Bren Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine; Mario Molina, Martin Professor of Environmental Sciences in the departments of chemistry and of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Paul Crutzen, director of the department of atmospheric chemistry at Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany, will share the $1 million prize. Crutzen showed in 1970 that naturally occurring nitrogen oxides catalytically destroy ozone, helping to regulate its concentration in the stratosphere. In 1974, Rowland and Molina recognized that chlorine from chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) also can attack ozone. More than a decade before the Antarctic ozone hole was discovered, they warned that continued emissions of CFCs would erode the ozone layer that protects Earth from dama...