THE HOLE in the ozone layer has reached record depths for the time of year above parts of Antarctica, scientists at the British Antarctic Survey said yesterday.
Readings at the survey's Faraday base show a 65 to 70 per cent destruction of the layer which shields the Earth from the sun's most harmful rays, raising fears that this year's ozone hole could be the largest on record.
Mr John Shanklin, one of the three-man team which discovered the hole in the 1980s, said: "Some parts of the Antarctic are seeing ozone levels much lower than they would normally see at this time of year."
Mr Shanklin said the hole seemed to be starting in a different part of the continent to normal. Such low ozone levels this early in the Antarctic spring, he said, were "quite worrying".He said levels of the most widely-used polluting compounds CFC 11 and CFC 12 were levelling off, indicating the success of the Montreal Protocol on phasing out ozone -depleting substances.
Mr Shanklin painted a "doom and gloom" scenario at this year's British Association meeting where he said the Antarctic ozone layer might be expected to disappear altogether by the year 2005 if attempts to phase-out CFCs failed.
Greenpeace yesterday accused Tesco of reneging on a commitment that all new stores would be built without environmentally damaging refrigeration by 1994. Tesco says it cannot find refrigerants which work at the low temperatures it needs.
