yego.me
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.

The Murder of Glenn Felts | Badlands, Texas
Supertasks

More Articles

View All
10 science based habits i'm trying to build to improve my life🍃
Habits are building blocks of your life. If you want to change your life, or if you want to change who you are, the first step always should be looking at your current habits and determining which of them are bad and which of them are good. Changing those…
Slope and intercept meaning from a table | Linear equations & graphs | Algebra I | Khan Academy
We’re told that Felipe feeds his dog the same amount every day from a large bag of dog food. Two weeks after initially opening the bag, he decided to start weighing how much food remained in the bag on a weekly basis. Here’s some of his data: So we see af…
How Wildlife Is Bouncing Back In This African Park | National Geographic
Love, love, passion! Show up! That is easy for you to become a ranger. When I came here in 1993, there was no animals. My jet air was empty before tourism, before bringing animals, before everything. There’s a need for a team to protect my Jetta. I remem…
How Far Can We Go? Limits of Humanity (Old Version – Watch the New One)
Is there a border we will never cross? Are there places we will never reach, no matter how hard we try? Turns out there are. Even with science fiction technology, we are trapped in our pocket of the universe. How can that be? And how far can we go? We li…
Hear How Diana Confronted Camilla | Diana: In Her Own Words
I walk into the house and stick my hand out to come the first time. I think you look at it over that we’re all upstairs and I just chatting when I suddenly noticed there’s no color move Charles upstairs. So this disturbs me, so I make my way to go downsta…
The Science of Curveballs
[Applause] You pitch that! Hey, how did you do that? That was a hard one because, uh, this ball is a little bit magic. It’s got a bit of string glued to the left side of it to make the ball curve to the left. Why is that? And that’s because the air that’…