Rowland, Frank Sherwood (1927-2012), an American chemist, helped to alert the scientific community to the threat to the ozone layer posed by chlorofluorocarbons (CFC’s), the artificial substances that were widely used in spray-cans and refrigerators. The ozone layer is a layer of the upper atmosphere with a high concentration of ozone, a form of oxygen. This layer shields Earth’s surface from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Rowland did this work with Mario J. Molina, and the two shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for chemistry with Paul Crutzen, a Dutch chemist who also worked on dangers faced by the ozone layer.
Rowland was born in Delaware, Ohio, on June 28, 1927. He completed high school by the age of 16. He began to study for a first degree at Ohio Wesleyan University, studying physics, chemistry, and mathematics. He took his degree in 1948. He pursued postgraduate studies at the University of Chicago, studying radiochemistry, the chemistry of radioactive elements. After gaining his Ph.D. in 1952, Rowland worked on radiochemistry at Princeton University and the universities of Kansas and California.
In 1972, Rowland heard a lecture by the British scientist James Lovelock that mentioned the movement of CFC’s in the atmosphere. CFC’s do not combine readily with other chemicals and therefore linger in the atmosphere. As far as scientists knew at that time, CFC’s caused no harmful effects. Lovelock suggested that tracking airborne CFC’s would reveal atmospheric movements. Rowland knew that CFC’s would eventually be broken down at high altitude by solar radiation, and he decided to study their fate. This research topic was taken on by a new researcher in his group, Mario Molina.
Rowland and Molina completed a paper stating that CFC’s at high altitude, after being broken down by sunlight, would destroy ozone. They predicted that even at current rates of CFC production, the ozone layer would be increasingly depleted each year–and production was in fact growing.
Rowland and Molina continued to study the problem and to publicize it. The U.S. government banned the use of CFC’s in aerosol sprays as early as 1978. But since this was only one use of the materials, world production of CFC’s did not diminish. In the mid-1980’s, scientists found that an “ozone hole” appeared each year over the South Pole. The scientific community soon became convinced that the ozone hole was due to the action of CFC’s, together with special conditions prevailing in the polar atmosphere. Resistance to the banning of CFC’s collapsed, and the Montreal Protocol of 1987, with amendments in 1992, pledged the industrialized countries to phase out CFC’s by the late 1990’s. Rowland died on March 10, 2012.
