Carbon tetrachloride (CCl4), once commonly used as a cleaning agent, is a known air toxin that eats away at the ozone layer. Its production has been banned for many years, but a new CIRES and NOAA study reports those rates are still 30-100 times higher than amounts reported to emission inventories.
Researchers from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Earth Observation Center (EOC) used Earth-observation satellites to determine that the ozone hole over Antarctica currently extends more than 26 million square kilometers”an area larger than the North American continent. It's approximately 2.5 million square kilometers larger than at the same time in 2014, and just less than the record in 2006, when it was 27 million square kilometers.
