This is the Nature Pastcast each month raiding nature's archive and looking at key moments in science.

In this show, we're exploring a paper published in the 1980s.

And now, ozone in the news.

Recently, scientists discovered a weak spot in the ozone layer over Antarctica.

Satellite observations have confirmed a progressive deterioration in the Earth's protective ozone layer above Antarctica.

Nature, International Weekly Journal of Science, 16th May, 1985.

Let us to Nature, page 207.

Large losses of total ozone in Antarctica.

The paper really changed the way people look at the environment.

It provided an image of nearly global environmental damage that people could see.

All of a sudden, you look at it differently.

Wow, we really can affect the planet as a whole.

J.C. Farman, B.G. Gardiner and J.D. Shanklin, British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, UK.

What we discovered at our Antarctic station was quite curious.

It seemed that each Antarctic spring, which for the Antarctic is September, October, ozone levels were dropping.

I'm Jonathan Shanklin, and I was one of the team of scientists that discovered the Antarctic ozone hole. Concerns were raised really in the 1960s and 70s

that substances that we were manufacturing,

in particular chlorofluorocarbons, the CFCs,

might put chlorine high into the atmosphere,

where it could then photocatalyticly interact with the ozone and destroy ozone.

Ozone is an invisible upper atmospheric gas that protects all forms of life on earth

for most of the sun's damaging radiation.

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