Aerosol outfall hits the Antarctic

Press, 27 January 1986, Page 17

Aerosol outfall hits the Antarctic

PA Auckland While Greenpeace tries to set up a base to protest against possible resource development In Antarctica, the air above the conservationists’ flagship is getting steadily dirtier.

New Zealand Meteorological Service researchers just back from the Antarctic have found the southern continent is not immune from the global increase in freon 12, a fluorocarbon found in aerosol cans and refrigerants. An atmospheric chemist, Dr Tom Clarkson, who has led two Antarctic expeditions to measure trace gases, said first analysis showed fluorocarbons at a level of 350 parts per trillion.

The latest measurement

showed the level had risen to 370. “That amount in the lower atmosphere is no great worry,” Dr Clarkson said. “It becomes a worry when it gets into the stratosphere, which it is doing.”

The effect — worse about urban areas — is to reduce the Earth’s ozone layer, increasing the ultra-violet danger. Greenpeace is concerned about the prospect of oil and mineral exploration and mining.

Dr Clarkson said the polar region was being polluted by the northern hemisphere’s industrial countries far more than any resource exploitation. Fluorocarbons present no real problem to anyone living adjacent to where they are produced because they move round

the world. Acid rain, on which Dr Clarkson and a Health Department scientist, Mr Roger Holden, recently presented a paper, has more local effects.

Acid rain has polluted large areas of Europe, Scandinavia and North America, but Dr Clarkson believes New Zealand will escape its worst effects unless large local industries are developed unchecked.

Sulphur and nitrogen oxides formed during the combustion of fossil fuels result in acid rain, which generally returns to Earth within a range of 2000 km. Dr Clarkson said heavy industry on Australia’s east coast was too far away to have an effect in New Zealand, and local acid rain production was insignificant.