Two days ago we left New Zealand, Christchurch, and flew
across the dateline to Punta Arenas, Chile, where we are
It's wintertime in the Southern Hemisphere, so our
lovely weather from Kona and America Samoa is no more,
but it is much fresher down here as you can tell. We are very
close to the Magellan Straights right now, and it does feel like we're
exploring through atmosphere that hasn't been sampled ever in some
cases or for many many years in others. During our flight we went
from 500 feet over the ocean all the way up to about
40,000 feet. And in that we could see sea ice, down at the bottom,
all the way up to the polar vortex at the very top.
Temperatures that went to minus 70 degrees Celcius. Outside the aircraft
it was extremely cold. That meant that we were sampling in the stratosphere,
so we saw a lot of high ozone levels, but not as high as they possibly could
have been. And we were very close to the ozone hole, which
will start to probably peak in about September. The ozone
hole is formed when you get a lot of CFCs, so chlorofluorocarbons.
These were species that were banned nearly 30 years ago as part
of the Montreal Protocol, but they're still in the atmosphere because they have a very
long lifetime. So it's going to be about 50 years before the CFCs
disappear from the atmosphere completely.
I'm here on Green Mountain on Ascension Island,
which is right in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Green Island is formed
by tectonic processes. The Atlantic ocean is
spreading and there's a ridge down the middle which represents
the spreading center, where magma is coming up to the surface
and then flowing under the ocean, becoming the new ocean floor. It's about 3000
kilometers from the nearest land. However,
when we came into the vicinity of the island, let's say
200 miles to the south, we began
to encounter a lot of smoke and pollution. The Atom project
is designed to understand how pollutants enter the
remote part of the global atmosphere. I have to say we were
totally unprepared for how thick the smoke was and how high
the pollution concentrations were. This smoke and pollution
originates in southern Africa where
people set fires for a variety of reasons -- for agriculture, for
range improvement. But we did have a computer model that we used
when we were planning the mission, and the model predicted that this stuff
would have been here, so maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. Although I have to say that
the model put the pollution in the right place
but maybe not the right amount. Maybe we saw two to three times as much than had
been forecast.