About Her Life

Susan Solomon (b. 1956), a Chicago native, first got hooked on science as a child while watching television shows like The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. In high school she took third place in a national science fair with a project that measured the amount of oxygen in gas mixtures, foreshadowing her future work in atmospheric chemistry. After high school, she studied chemistry at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago.

Solomon was always particularly fascinated by seeing chemistry at work in the world outside of the laboratory. She was thrilled to learn of work being done at IIT to study the chemistry of the planet Jupiter’s atmosphere. “Chemistry in a planet instead of a test tube,” as Solomon put it, fueled her passion for research.

The Antarctic ozone hole in 2003— the second largest ever recorded. Courtesy NASA.

After getting her B.S. degree from IIT in 1977, she went to graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, where she specialized in atmospheric chemistry. This time her planet of study was not Jupiter but Earth itself. She earned her Ph.D. in 1981. Though only in her 20s, she was already a respected atmospheric scientist, asked to review the work of other, more established scientists for scientific journals.

In the early 1970s scientists began to suspect that something was up with the ozone layer above the earth. Ozone is a special form of oxygen, and a layer of it resides in the stratosphere, which is the layer of our atmosphere that begins about 5 to 9 miles above the earth's surface. Ozone protects us from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays. Scientists suspected that the ozone layer was being affected by the presence in the stratosphere of man-made gases called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were used in things like refrigerators, air conditioners, and aerosol cans. The assumption at the time was that ozone would slowly decompose due to the presence of CFCs in the stratosphere. But then in the 1980s, huge drops in ozone levels over Antarctica began occurring every spring (September through December in the Southern Hemisphere).

To investigate the ozone "hole," as it was called, Solomon, now working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado, led an expedition to McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, in 1986. Because the ozone hole opened up in the early spring, Solomon and her team had to travel to Antarctica in the late winter to study the hole as it formed, enduring unforgivingly cold temperatures and the nearly 24-hour darkness of the Antarctic winter. During this and a second expedition in 1987, she and her team were able to gather enough data to show that high levels of chlorine oxide, which was being released by CFCs, were reacting with the clouds in the stratosphere to destroy the ozone.

Solomon has also investigated ozone depletion in the atmosphere elsewhere in the world. She has led missions to the Arctic to study a smaller ozone hole that has developed over the North Pole, and has helped show how volcanoes can speed up CFC-induced ozone destruction. Her work is at the foundation of the U.N. Montreal Protocol, the international agreement to protect the ozone layer by regulating the production of man-made compounds that deplete the ozone.

Today Solomon continues her work at NOAA and at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has earned many honors for her work. In addition having a glacier in Antarctica named in her honor in 1994, she was awarded the 1999 National Medal of Science, the highest scientific award bestowed by the United States government. In 2004 she received the international Blue Planet Prize, which carries an award of roughly $460,000. She is the author of The Coldest March: Scott’s Fatal Antarctic Expedition (2002). Solomon married her husband, Barry Sidwell, in 1988.

(Adapted from "Meet Susan Solomon," on the Faces in the Environment Web site, Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2001.)

For Further Reading on the Web

An Interview with Dr. Susan Solomon — audio recording of a 2002 interview with Solomon, from The National Academies.