 You probably know that ozone layer protects the earth from the harmful sun's UV radiation But did you know we have the ability to destroy it as well? We also created a lot of holes a few years back. How did we do that? And then what did we do to stop it? Well, let's find out to answer this question We need to ask ourselves. What exactly is ozone? How is it formed? So, you know that there's already oxygen molecules up in the air, right? That's the one that we breathe so Oxygen molecules high up in the air They receive sunlight In fact high energy radiation this high radiation can actually break that oxygen molecule into its individual oxygen atoms What happens next is of course individual oxygen atoms are very very reactive and so they will Combine back to give O2. So this is a reversible reaction But occasionally one of these oxygen atom can combine with another O2 And when that happens it gives us an O3 O3 Very rare molecule, right? Well, that's what ozone is. It's not so rare actually So ozone is basically a lot of O3 molecules high up in the air that forms a blanket which shields us from the UV radiation So how did we start destroying O3 molecules? Well humanity as we our technology grew we started building a lot of gadgets and stuff Which are emitting harmful gases into the atmosphere one such harmful gas is called CFC which stands for Chlorocarbon This is this was mostly emitted by our refrigerators and fire extinguishers and They were directly going and destroying our ozone how exactly you asked will not get into the detail But what these molecules were doing was that you can probably guess that it has chlorine in it So as CFC rise up in the air Just like with the auto molecules the sunlight would come and break the CFC and you would get chlorine out of it So sunlight would break this and you get chlorine and a single atom of chlorine is extremely reactive so what that chlorine would do is that that chlorine would go and Break that ozone O3 back into O and O2 and what made CL so dangerous So deadly is that once it does that it doesn't stop chlorine comes out of this reaction and is now free to do it to another O3 molecule in other words a single chlorine can destroy multiple O3 molecules and so you can imagine if A lot of us are using refrigerators fire extinguishers and probably other devices which keep on releasing CFC into the atmosphere It wouldn't be long before we start creating holes in the ozone layer and that's exactly what happened And so how did we stop it? Well, we simply banned CFC so we just banned this molecule we made sure that whatever we're building we have to make sure it is CFC free So today Refrigerators fire extinguishers all your other whatever gadgets we use whatever devices we use they don't produce a CFC anymore So we have limited how much CFC goes into the atmosphere and that's how we have saved the ozone