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# Above Antarctica, the sky is mending
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/ozone-healing/
- Published: 2026-09-02T03:38:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-05T04:43:20.000Z
- Description: Every September a hole opens in the sky above Antarctica. It is now among the smallest it has been since the early nineties.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Global Good News, All stories

Every year around now, as the sun returns to Antarctica, a hole opens in the ozone layer above it. That has been true since the 1980s, when we worked out that the chemicals in our fridges and spray cans were quietly dismantling the part of the atmosphere that keeps ultraviolet light off our skin. What happened next is the reason this story is worth telling. The world agreed to stop, and then actually stopped. The Montreal Protocol is the only environmental agreement every country on Earth has signed, and forty years on you can measure the result in the sky. The 2025 hole closed on the first of December, the weakest and shortest lived in five years, and among the smallest since the early 1990s. It was the second year running that the hole was smaller and briefer than the long, stubborn ones of 2020 to 2023\. Chlorine in the stratosphere is falling, slowly, because we stopped putting it there.

There is one honest wrinkle, and it is the kind that gets fixed. In April this year Susan Solomon at MIT, the scientist who worked out what was eating the ozone layer in the first place, published a study in Nature Communications showing that certain ozone depleting chemicals still permitted as ingredients for plastics and non stick coatings are leaking at seven times the rate anyone assumed, 3.6 per cent rather than 0.5\. That pushes full recovery back about seven years, to 2073\. Which is a delay, not a reversal, and it is useful to know precisely because somebody measured it. The Antarctic layer is still on track to return to its 1980 state around 2066, the rest of the world some decades sooner, and there may be a year in the 2030s with no Antarctic hole at all. Not many problems this big have gone this way. This one is going the right way because a great many countries decided together that it should, and then kept at it for four decades.

Sources and links

Our short take: measurements from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, recovery projections from the international Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion, and the feedstock leakage study published in Nature Communications by MIT researchers in April 2026\. Photograph: Michael Studinger, public domain.

- [Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service](https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/monitoring-ozone-layer)Watch this year's hole open and close, updated daily.
- [MIT: a regulatory loophole could delay ozone recovery by years](https://news.mit.edu/2026/regulatory-loophole-could-delay-ozone-recovery-0416)Susan Solomon's April study, explained plainly.