Joseph Farman, 1930–2013

Joseph Farman had been manually recording data on the atmosphere in Antarctica for 25 years when a superior asked him why he bothered, since satellites were gathering the data automatically. The answer came two years later, when Farman’s data—not that from the high-tech satellites—revealed a hole the size of the U.S. in the ozone layer over Antarctica.

As a recent graduate of Cambridge University in 1956, Farman spotted an ad seeking physicists to work in the Antarctic, which “appealed to his sense of adventure,” said The Guardian (U.K.). He soon shipped out to the South Pole and set out ground meters to monitor the ozone layer, the stratospheric “shield” that protects the earth from most of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays.

When ozone levels dropped severely in the early 1980s, Farman first thought his equipment had failed, said The New York Times. But new meters “produced results even more startling,” and in 1985 Farman co-authored a paper showing ozone levels over Antarctica had fallen almost 40 percent from 1975 to 1984. The study confirmed the thesis that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in refrigerators and aerosol cans were to blame, and Farman became “something of a working-class hero among scientists.”

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NASA sheepishly admitted that its satellites had collected but dismissed the same data, in what is now considered “one of the greatest scientific oversights of all time,” said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). Political negotiations to save the vanishing ozone layer led to the 1987 Montreal Protocol phasing out CFCs, and the hole is now shrinking.