yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

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.

More Articles

View All
Geoff Ralston and Adora Cheung Discuss Startup School
All right, Chef/Owner Dora. Thanks for coming in. As Craig, we’re here to talk about Startup School. So, Jeff, could you break down what’s happening this year with Startup School? Sure! Well, Startup School began a couple of years ago with a course Sam …
Ian Hogarth
Now we’re going to move on to the next speaker, which is Ian Hogarth of Sonick. He’s the co-founder and CEO. Y Combinator funded Sonick in 2007, and a fun fact, it’s actually through Ian that I found out about Y Combinator all that time ago. So if you don…
How to Operate with Keith Rabois (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 14)
Um, so I’m going to talk about how to operate. I’ve watched some of the prior classes, and I’m going to assume that you’ve already sort of hired a bunch of relentlessly resourceful people, that you built a product at least some people love, that you prob…
Scott Cook - Founder and Chairman of the Executive Committee, Intuit | Khan Academy
All right, I think we’re ready to start. Anyone who wants to—anyone else wants to join us for the talk with Scott Cook, founder of Intuit? So I’ll just start. You know, for everyone here at Khan Academy who doesn’t know both Scott and Cigna Cook are, you …
Differentiability and continuity | Derivatives introduction | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
What we’re going to do in this video is explore the notion of differentiability at a point. That is just a fancy way of saying, does the function have a defined derivative at a point? So let’s just remind ourselves of a definition of a derivative. There …
Michael Burry: 5 Life Lessons That Made Him Rich (UCLA Speech)
A key life lesson that I learned in my early 20s is that the best way to get better at something is to learn from those who’ve already successfully achieved what you’re trying to do. This made me realize that to be a better investor, I needed to turn off …