Summer Storms to Create New Ozone Holes as Earth Warms?
More storms may trigger ozone depletion in populated areas far from the Poles.
What's more, if more sunlight reaches Earth, skin cancer could become the new marquee risk of global warming.
As the planet warms, some studies have suggested summer storms may become more frequent and intense. This would send more water vapor—a potent greenhouse gas—into the stratosphere, the middle layer of Earth's atmosphere, which sits between 9 and 22 miles (14 and 35 kilometers) above Earth's surface.
In a recent series of research flights over the United States, Harvard University atmospheric chemist James Anderson and colleagues found that summer storms often loft water vapor into the stratosphere.
"It was an unequivocal observation," he said. "We had a number of flights, and this was an abiding feature" of the storms.
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