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
Rescuing a Fierce Leopard: See What It Takes | Expedition Raw
Right 80 mg of ketamine and 4A 8 Mig of made tomine; that should do the job. Translocating an animal doesn’t happen very often; it’s a last resort for us. Me and Rudy walk up to the cage, and I’m the bait. I call his attention, so he turns his butt and gi…
Gordon Tries Smoked Oysters | Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted
They’re all live oysters. This is all live oysters, so they’re everywhere. I’m here in Maine on North Haven Island, where I’m going to harvest oysters with Adam, a local farmer of America’s favorite mollusk. This little tiny bed can produce 250 to 300,000…
How I learned to make more friends
I’ve been very blessed to have had some absolutely amazing friendships in my life. While many of them have come and gone—some of them got married, some of them moved towns, one of them became a priest, actually—but all the amazing friends in my life have …
The Arctic Story Hunter | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic
Conjure an image of the Russian tundra, Siberia, as far north as you can go before you hit the Arctic Ocean. Your image probably looks like a snowy whiteout. You might picture stark, forbidding ice scapes devoid of color and life. But through the lens of …
Finding area of figure after transformation using determinant | Matrices | Khan Academy
We’re told to consider this matrix transformation. This is a matrix that you can use, it represents a transformation on the entire coordinate plane. Then they tell us that the transformation is performed on the following rectangle. So, this is the rectang…
Civil society | Citizenship | High school civics | Khan Academy
Civil society is one of those terms that you might hear in a politician’s speech, maybe in a line about the importance of maintaining a strong relationship between the government and civil society. But what does it actually mean? A society that’s civilize…