$BTC Forty years ago, three British scientists made an announcement that caused worldwide alarm.

They had detected a hole in the ozone layer, the shield that protects the Earth from the most harmful radiation from the sun, without which life as we know it on our planet would not be possible.

The study was published on May 1, 1985, in the journal Nature and its authors were Jonathan Shanklin, Joe Farman, and Brian Gardiner, researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).

Years earlier, in the 1970s, two chemists who later won Nobel Prizes, Mario Molina from Mexico and Sherwood Rowland from the United States, had warned about the damaging impact on ozone from compounds called chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs, which were then widely used in refrigerators, air conditioners, and aerosols, among other everyday products. But it was the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer that prompted governments to act. And they did so very quickly.