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June 1, 2018 02:00 pm

Scientists Race To Find Who is Pumping a Dangerous Gas Into the Atmosphere

An anonymous reader shares a report: When the research was published in Nature on May 16, it was like a bomb dropped. A greenhouse gas is billowing into the atmosphere from a source somewhere in East Asia that no one can identify at a rate scientists have never before seen, and it's ignited a scientific dash to get to the bottom of it. All countries are supposed to comply with the rules laid out in the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which banned the production of CFCs -- chlorofluorocarbons, which deplete the ozone layer and contribute to global warming -- with only temporary exception of a few economically developing countries. If everyone fulfills their end of the deal, the amount of CFCs in the atmosphere should gradually wane over the course of several decades. CFC levels plummeted through the 1990s, and then stagnated between 2002 and 2005. But in in 2014, mysterious toxic plumes of CFC-11 -- a type of CFC -- began to drift across the Pacific Ocean. Stephen Montzaka, a chemist who studies and monitors CFCs for The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), was shocked.

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