Susan Solomon with her penguin pals.

Most of you out there are probably wondering right now, "How can I get a glacier named after me?" A scientist named Susan Solomon has earned this very honor, with her name given to a glacier in the coldest place on earth, Antarctica. How in the world did this happen?

Dr. Solomon began life in Chicago, and first got hooked on science watching the undersea adventures of Jacques Cousteau on TV. In high school, she took third place in a nationwide science fair with a project that measured the amount of oxygen in gas mixtures, foreshadowing her future work. For college she chose to study chemistry at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

Solomon was always fascinated more by the chemistry of the real world than that of the laboratory. She was thrilled to learn of work being done at IIT to study the chemistry of the atmosphere of the planet Jupiter. "Chemistry in a planet instead of a test tube," as she put it, was exactly what she wanted to study.

After graduating from IIT she went to graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, where Mario Molina had also earned his PhD. There she specialized in atmospheric chemistry, continuing her study of chemistry-in-a-planet. This time her planet of study was not Jupiter but the smaller yet more heavily populated earth. She earned her doctorate in 1981, and while still in her twenties she was respected enough in the field of atmospheric science to review the papers of other scientists submitted for publications in scientific journals.

In the early 1970s Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland began unraveling the chemistry of CFCs and ozone. Their experiments suggested that the ozone layer would very slowly decompose due to the presence of CFCs in the stratosphere. Then all of a sudden in the 1980s, huge drops in ozone levels over Antarctica began occurring every spring (September-December in the Southern Hemisphere). The ozone hole, as it was called, was detected by both Dobson spectrometers on the ground and by satellite observation.

Obviously there was more going on than anyone had thought. Why was the ozone depletion happening so much faster than anyone had expected? There was another strange puzzle. Why Antarctica? Why did the hole form so far from any people who might have been using CFCs? To answer these questions, an emergency expedition to Antarctica was organized in 1986.

Dr. Solomon in her office.

Dr. Solomon, by this time working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado, was asked to lead the expedition. Because the ozone hole opened up in the early spring, this meant Solomon and her team would have to travel to Antarctica in the late winter to study the hole as it formed. Not only would the temperatures be unforgivingly cold, but they would have to travel and work in the near 24-hour darkness of the Antarctic winter.

For most of her career, Dr. Solomon had used computer models to study the chemistry of the atmosphere. Now her work was about to become as hands-on as it gets. Working from McMurdo Base, Antarctica, she measured how the air above the frozen south absorbed the moonlight of the long polar night. Handling the cold in stride like a true Chicagoan (her right eyelid once froze shut while collecting data outdoors), she was able to detect high levels of chlorine oxide (ClO) in the stratosphere.

In a 1987 expedition, high-flying airplanes collected more data showing chlorine oxide in great abundance over Antarctica. This convinced most scientists that the reaction mechanism of Molina's theories was causing the ozone loss, rather than natural causes.

Dr. Solomon's work helped to shed some light on the strange happenings in the stratosphere above Antarctica. For the details of her discoveries, read Why Antarctica? In addition, she has carried out investigations of ozone depletion in the atmosphere of the rest of the world. Complimenting her Antarctic expeditions, she has led expeditions to the Arctic to study a smaller ozone hole that has developed over the North Pole. (This is particularly dangerous as the Arctic is much closer to populated areas than is Antarctica.) Dr. Solomon has also helped show how volcanoes, though not damaging to the ozone layer by themselves, can speed up CFC-induced ozone destruction. Her work has helped us better assess the risks posed by ozone depletion and allowed people to combat the problem more effectively.

Today Dr. Solomon continues her work at NOAA and at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has earned many honors for her work. In addition to the glacier in Antarctica named in her honor, she was awarded the 1999 National Medal of Science, the highest scientific award bestowed by the United States government.

Next: Why Antarctica?

Career Bio — Susan Solomon — read about Dr. Solomon's life and work in her own words at this site from Careers Magazine.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1995 — featuring the science and autobiographies of Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland, from the Nobel Foundation.

Image credit

Photographs of Dr. Solomon courtesy the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

References

Glanz, James. "How Susan Solomon's Research Changed Our View of Earth." R&D Magazine, 1994, 34(9), 46.

Heacox, Kim. Antarctica: The Last Continent. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1989.

Roan, Sharon. Ozone Crisis: The 15-Year Evolution of a Sudden Global Emergency. New York: Wiley, 1989.