Living under depleted skies

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

PUNTA ARENAS, Chile -- The worst of the ozone hole has pulled back once more to Antarctica this southern spring, leaving behind a shadow of uncertainty for the people living at the bottom of the Americas.

How many will develop skin cancer in years to come? How many more decades must their children live with dangerous ultraviolet rays? Will the global treaty to save the ozone layer survive until then?

The people of wind-blown Punta Arenas, like the local evergreens forever bent eastward by westerly gusts, are adjusting to the intense radiation that pours each year through the gap in the ozone layer. At least that is what some say.

"People are better informed. They're buying more sunblock and putting it on their children," said pharmacist Gerardo Leal.

"They've gotten used to it," taxi driver Rene Bahamonde assured a visitor.

But on a "red alert" day when ultraviolet rays could lead to damaged eyes, Mr. Bahamonde's dark glasses sat unused by his side. And local health chief Dr. Lidia Amarales said many of the 150,000 Punta Arenans take few precautions against a damaging sun as they go about their business on the quiet streets that slope downward to the broad, chilly waters of the Strait of Magellan.

The reason is simple: It's cool here.

"When it's [86 degrees] somewhere, people don't go out into the sun. Here, with [55 degrees], they go outside," Dr. Amarales explained.

This is a gray, drizzly corner of South America, but clouds are no protection against ultraviolet rays. The temperature rarely exceeds 70 degrees, and "without the heat, they don't 'feel' the radiation," Dr. Amarales said. "We need to change habits."

The stratosphere's layer of ozone, a form of oxygen, filtered out almost all of the sun's cancer-causing ultraviolet-B rays for countless millennia. But in the 1970s, scientists warned that man-made chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), used in aerosol sprays and refrigerants, were destroying ozone through chain reactions high in the skies. By the 1980s, satellite images showed the world that an "ozone hole" had formed over Antarctica.