News Climate

Smoke from Australia’s intense fires in 2019 and 2020 damaged the ozone layer

Increasingly large blazes threaten to undo decades of work to help Earth’s protective layer

photo of a police car in the foreground with cloud of smoke billowing above Yanderra township buildings

A towering cloud of smoke rises over the Green Wattle Creek bushfire on December 21, 2019, near the township of Yanderra in New South Wales, Australia.

Helitak430/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

By Carolyn Gramling

- More than 2 years ago

Towers of smoke that rose high into the stratosphere during Australia’s “black summer” fires in 2019 and 2020 destroyed some of Earth’s protective ozone layer, researchers report in the March 18 Science.