Flight at the Edge of the Ozone Layer | One Strange Rock

2m read

·Nov 11, 2024

NARRATOR: 30 years ago, we discovered man-made chemicals had punched a hole in the ozone layer. Is that hole here to stay, waiting around to kill us? Today, we're trying hard to find out. Morgan Sandercock is about to test an experimental plane, perfect for sampling ozone.

MAN: (ON RADIO) Copy that. So I felt pressure rising.

MORGAN SANDERCOCK: (VOICEOVER) We think we can go as high as 90,000 feet.

MAN: (ON RADIO) Jim, you ready to go?

JIM PAYNE: (ON RADIO) We're ready.

MORGAN SANDERCOCK: (VOICEOVER) That's the big boy territory. That's where things can go wrong very, very quickly. If we lose cabin pressure, then, the pilots could very easily pass out. And we don't have any automatic systems to recover from that.

WOMAN: (ON RADIO) Getting ready to roll.

NARRATOR: Now, a glider might sound like a dangerous choice so high up. But gliders don't have engines, which means they can't pollute the team's samples.

MAN: (ON RADIO) Confirm [inaudible] off.

WOMAN: (ON RADIO) [inaudible] is off. Wing wheel is off.

MAN: (ON RADIO) Been running at 11:32.

MAN: (ON RADIO) 11:32. Written down in GPS 5.

MAN: (ON RADIO) Airborne. [music playing]

NARRATOR: The Perlan glider uses air rising over the Southern Andes to reach extraordinary heights.

MAN: (ON RADIO) Airspeed, 70 knots. Looking beautiful.

MAN: (ON RADIO) Yeah?

MAN: (ON RADIO) Really high.

MAN: (ON RADIO) Traffic.

MAN: (ON RADIO) Yeah.

NARRATOR: 52,000 feet up makes this the highest glider flight ever. But you've got to get this high to get a great picture of the ozone layer. The good news is that thanks to a global ban on ozone-harming chemicals, it looks like the hole is healing up. Our shield is regenerating.

Fashion Brands You Wear As You Get Richer

Blackbody radiation | Physics | Khan Academy

View All

American Empire

The United States is, shockingly, a bunch of states that are united. It was just 13 to start with, but as time marched on, the border marked west, bringing us to today and the 48 contiguous states plus Alaska and Hawaii. They’re usually drawn in these lit…

Introduction to factoring higher degree monomials | Algebra 2 | Khan Academy

In this video, we’re going to dig a little bit deeper into our knowledge or our understanding of factoring. Now, factoring is something that we’ve been doing for many years now. You can go all the way back to when you’re thinking about how would I factor …

The Right Reason and Way to Approach Strategics

All right, so the next panel that we have will discuss the right reasons and right ways to approach strategics. The speakers on this panel are from Genentech, J&J, Medtronic, and Novartis, and they all focus on finding opportunities and partners that …

Derivatives of tan(x) and cot(x) | Derivative rules | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

We already know the derivatives of sine and cosine. We know that the derivative with respect to x of sine of x is equal to cosine of x. We know that the derivative with respect to x of cosine of x is equal to negative sine of x. So, what we want to do in…

The Absurd Search For Dark Matter

I am at a gold mine a couple hours outside of Melbourne because, one kilometer underground, they’re putting in a detector to look for dark matter. Let’s go. (epic music) It’s gonna take 30 minutes to go down a kilometer underground. Dark matter is thought…

Into the Ocean | Branching Out | Part 3

[Music] As we eco-road trip across this amazing land, we can’t forget the rivers we’ve crossed and the waves crashing beside coastal roads. More than 70 percent of our planet is covered in water, and more than 96 of that is in our oceans. Unfortunately, 1…

Flight at the Edge of the Ozone Layer | One Strange Rock

More Articles