13 January 2004 Click image for full size!
Ozone measurements are pretty important to us here at the Pole, the place where the ozone hole appears every springtime when ozone depleting chemicals have time to accumulate and the first rays of the sun set off reactions which destroy ozone molecules in the stratosphere (you do know this, don't you?!). There are a couple ways to do it- this is one of them. We launch balloons once a week right now- the hole has pretty much filled in as much as it will for the season so we monitor it this way. The balloons go up about 30 km and hover for a bit until they burst, with the parachute bringing the sonde down slowly so that we can get another round of measurement- once up and once down. We don't recover too many balloons though. Although theoretically, we could go and find them and use them again, once they hit the ground they're quickly covered in snow and pretty much lost after that. But through our activities, there are probably several hundred, if not thousands of old balloons littering the glacial plateau if you can find them!