- How does Thomas Midgley's later invention of chlorofluorocarbons connect to his legacy of environmental harm?
Green and Environmental Chemistry
Chemistry aimed at reducing environmental impact.
- Why was nitrogen in the atmosphere unusable to crops despite making up eighty percent of the air?
- What ecological harm did the same persistence that made DDT effective end up causing, as documented in Silent Spring?
- How did Rachel Carson's later work change the scientific consensus on DDT?
- How did Herzberg's spectroscopic catalog of free radicals end up shaping atmospheric chemistry and astrophysics?
- How did decades of routine measurements at Halley Research Station reveal a sudden drop in stratospheric ozone?
- Why had satellite data failed to corroborate the ozone loss earlier than the ground-based survey did?
- What chemical mechanism involving CFCs and polar stratospheric clouds destroys ozone over Antarctica?
- How quickly did the Montreal Protocol follow the scientific announcement of the ozone hole?
- How do chlorofluorocarbons destroy the stratospheric ozone layer?
- What did the 46 nations that signed the Montreal Protocol in 1987 actually commit to doing?
- Why is the Montreal Protocol considered uniquely successful compared to other environmental treaties?
- What evidence shows the ozone layer has recovered since the Montreal Protocol took effect?
- Why were CFCs considered harmless for decades before Molina and Rowland's 1974 paper?
- How does a single chlorine atom end up destroying thousands of ozone molecules?
- What made the 1985 Antarctic ozone hole measurement so alarming to the researchers who found it?
- What made the Montreal Protocol succeed where other environmental treaties have struggled?
- How did Yukio Hirose confirm which compound in the bronze was responsible?
- Which drugs are now manufactured using metathesis reactions?
- Where was Ideonella sakaiensis discovered, and what led researchers to it?
- How do the enzymes PETase and MHETase work together to break down PET plastic?
- Why is it remarkable that a bacterium evolved to digest a plastic that's only existed since the 1940s?