Shadowing Practice: Something’s Happening to the Ozone Hole - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Ready?
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I'm scaling a glacier right now to show you a view
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that most people can never see of a place we weren't even sure existed until 200 years ago.
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This is Antarctica.
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And in 1985, it became the center of a global crisis.
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The ozone layer still is disappearing.
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A mysterious massive hole.
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The ozone is severely depleted.
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Without immediate action, the sun we have always worshipped, our children will soon fear.
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Directly over Antarctica, high up in the stratosphere, was a massive hole.
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And if we hadn't done anything about it, today we'd be living in an alternate world.
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By now, a hole would be forming over the North Pole as well.
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By 2040, that hole would be over the entire planet.
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By 2065, skin cancer rates would be soaring.
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If you lived anywhere here, you'd get a sunburn outside in five minutes.
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But that's not the world we're living in.
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In fact, you've probably stopped hearing this story altogether.
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That wasn't by accident.
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It was a choice.
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In fact, two choices.
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Both of which dramatically changed the course of human history for the better.
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So let me show you how that happened.
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and what's about to happen next.
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Because it turns out this little sliver at the bottom of the map is actually the center of our whole planet.
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And you need to see this right now, because scientists say that we need to make the next big choice.
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I remember hearing all about the ozone hole as a kid.
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The situation seemed really dire, even at seven years old, but also really far away.
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The problem is particularly bad in Antarctica.
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A hole in the atmospheric ozone.
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Over Antarctica.
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Antarctica.
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A huge gap over Antarctica.
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And then one day, the news about it just stopped.
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And I stopped thinking about it.
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Until I got the opportunity to go to that far away place.
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We're getting on the plane.
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Gotta admit, I'm a little bit nervous.
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Turns out, getting to Antarctica is a little sketchy.
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You can take a ship from the tip of South America, which is scary because then you have to cross the Drake Passage,
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which is historically known as the deadliest ocean passage in the world.
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Three oceans collide here.
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There are an estimated 800 shipwrecks somewhere at the bottom of this passage.
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Or the other option is to fly on a plane, like this one.
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We flew from Cape Town, traveling with the White Desert Foundation's Science Week, which supports scientific research in Antarctica.
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The thing about the plane is it's also not without its scary things.
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Because the runway that we're about to land on is made of ice.
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Please fasten your seatbelt.
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Welcome to Antarctica.
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Fewer than 5,000 people are allowed on this entire continent right now, almost all of them scientists.
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No one owns Antarctica.
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It's an entire continent run by an international treaty system for peace and science.
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But because it's so hard to get to, doing research here takes a huge effort.
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It's typically limited to the Antarctic summer.
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Right now it's summer, and the sun never sets.
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It's like 10pm right now.
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10pm to me, because all the time zones meet down here, so there's no official time zone at all.
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Researchers typically choose the time zone of whoever gives them food, their supply base, and to make things even more complicated, well...
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It's so slippery and so windy that the wind is pushing me backward, look at this.
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The wind is pushing me, the wind, I'm not moving backward.
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It's just hard to do anything here.
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And it wasn't any easier 40 years ago when researchers first noticed that ozone problem.
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We are gearing up for what should be about a 10 hour hike.
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Now I gotta put on these massive spikes to walk across this ice.
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I can report it is very cold and very windy.
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I didn't quite realize what we were about to get ourselves into.
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But what we found at the end was unlike anything I'd ever seen.
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Up here in the stratosphere, all over the Earth, you'll find a bunch of molecules that shield us from radiation by absorbing harmful UV rays.
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It's like a natural sunscreen for the Earth.
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This is the ozone layer.
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Scientists in this research station have been watching it for decades.
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One season, they just went, that's weird, it's really low.
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Like, what's going on here?
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So a small team set out to Antarctica to find out.
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Leading the team is Susan Solomon.
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And I called up the researcher who led that trip.
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But back then, she was a 30-year-old scientist with a question.
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A lot of people didn't believe it at first.
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How can this be happening?
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You know, what could possibly cause this?
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What she was about to discover would forever change the lives of you, me, and everyone else on this planet.
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And the reason that she could figure it out was
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because of an incredible decision made decades prior that changed the course of history.
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But while I'm here in Antarctica today, a very real problem is snow blindness because of all the sun reflecting off the ice.
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Oh my god.
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Do not take your sunglasses off.
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Snow blindness is a real thing.
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It's like looking at the sun.
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So I had to buy these special sunglasses.
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And I'm buying them with this.
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This is my real Mercury card.
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Mercury is the tool that we've used since we launched to manage our finances.
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I started my Mercury account before I launched this show.
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I feel cool.
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Do I look cool?
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Mercury really gets that what I want isn't just money storage, it's financial tools that help me actually achieve our big, ambitious, creative goals.
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It's why when we got the opportunity for this trip, we knew we could actually make it happen.
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This was by far the biggest trip we've ever done.
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This was a ton of planning and a ton of gear that we needed to buy.
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But with all of our finances in one place with Mercury, we could make a budget and stay within it.
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They helped us get the equipment that we needed to stay safe.
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And get all of the incredible shots that we were dreaming of.
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It's all unbelievably intuitive and it's easy to sign up.
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Mercury's been great for me, and I think it would be for any entrepreneur or small company.
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It's a financial technology company, not a bank.
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So if you want to learn more about what they can do, check the link in the description or go to mercury.com.
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And now, I'm ready to go.
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If you time traveled back to the 1950s, This incredible place of peace and science was almost a war zone.
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It's the middle of the Cold War.
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Antarctica is some of the last unclaimed territory on Earth.
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So, of course, countries are trying to grab it.
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If you look at a map during that time, it really looks like pie slices, with overlapping claims and two superpowers saying that they could just claim it all.
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Everybody was like, this is crazy.
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But then, one day, a small group of scientists had a different idea.
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If you ever find yourself doubting that a small group of people can change the world.
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It's April 5th, 1950.
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Some of the most famous geophysicists at the time gather together for a dinner party.
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And someone says something like, you know, we really should study what's going on before they, like, destroy things in Antarctica.
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And they all agree, so they go to the governments of the biggest countries fighting there, and they say basically, hey,
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could you just pause on the claiming land thing, just for 18 months?
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You can get right back to it afterward, we promise.
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I'm paraphrasing here a lot.
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But this proposal actually works.
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And they decided to run a massive collaborative international program called the International Geophysical Year.
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Also known as the IGY.
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It was an 18-month global effort starting in July of 1957.
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All of a sudden, these Cold War rivals are suddenly setting up research stations all over the place, and they begin to uncover just how important Antarctica really is.
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You can see this if instead of looking at your typical map of the world, you flip it.
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Every year, ocean water freezes and melts around Antarctica, and that causes these huge changes worldwide.
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Because as water freezes, salt gets pushed out and sinks, driving all these global currents.
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The currents in California and India and Australia are all decided in Antarctica.
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That's why scientists call it the heartbeat of the planet, because this is actually the center of the world.
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And the size of this continent is way bigger than you think.
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It's bigger than all of Europe, bigger than the United States, twice the size of Australia.
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It's huge.
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They also learned that the ice covering this huge continent was way thicker than we imagined.
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On average, this ice is over 2 kilometers, or 1.3 miles, thick.
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Antarctica has a scary amount of water tied up in its ice.
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Around 91% of the world's total fresh water is in the ice that I'm hiking across right now that if it melted,
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it would raise global sea levels by nearly 60 meters.
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All of this would be underwater.
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Well, there goes my home.
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During the hike, there was an expression that the scientists kept saying, which was, nothing in Antarctica stays in Antarctica.
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And the more I learned about this place, the more I understood that.
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So we're now about halfway to our destination, and the landscape is getting more and more alien.
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And this is when we come across a little buddy.
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So they were figuring all of this out,
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and by 1958, the IGY had been so successful that nobody really wanted to stop and go back to the fighting.
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So they didn't.
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Our grandparents' generation chose a different future.
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And in 1959, governments all around the world signed the Antarctic Treaty,
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turning this place into the world's only science continent.
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You can see the treaty happening in real time here.
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So we just came from a UK camp.
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That's the Indian base right there called Maitri.
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And then beyond it, you can see the Russian base called Nova.
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Today, there are about 70 research stations all around Antarctica, supporting scientists doing all kinds of groundbreaking research.
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And during the IGY, this particular base started collecting constant data on ozone directly above Antarctica.
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And by 1985, they had 30 years of data to look back on and could conclusively say, there was a hole and we really needed to fix it.
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Within a few years it was clear that ozone depletion was happening in the northern hemisphere too.
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Now it's getting close to the home.
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And it's happening over places like Washington DC and Boston and Paris, you know.
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It's not just an Antarctic problem.
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Dr. Solomon and her team ultimately concluded
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that the problem was a chemical found in everyday products that were rising into the atmosphere, breaking apart and binding with ozone.
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And it would get worse if we didn't stop using them.
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So our parents' generation came together and chose a different future.
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Do you remember where you were when the Montreal Protocol was signed?
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What you, like, what was it, what was the experience like for you?
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Well I was actually in Antarctica making measurements so I was probably the last one to know.
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It was an interesting feeling of being under the ozone hole knowing that,
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you know, half a world away an incredible change had just occurred
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that really had a lot of potential to change things in the future and indeed it did.
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By 2009, every single country in the world signed the Montreal Protocol, effectively banning those chemicals.
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But the victory here wasn't just a ban, it was also technological innovation to find replacements.
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We found substitutes in every application, whether it was foam blowing or spray cans or refrigerators, etc, etc, down the line.
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And now, yeah, it's working.
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We're actually seeing the ozone layer recover.
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And we know that it's recovering because of science still happening in Antarctica.
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Satellites measure ozone levels from the sky, and scientists here still monitor ozone from the ground.
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The Indian base, I know that they're doing ozone monitoring, so they're watching how the ozone hole is healing itself from that base right there.
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We are all very lucky for the work that you did.
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No, no, it's me that's lucky.
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But the science here hasn't stopped.
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It's always changing.
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And after five hours of hiking across the ice, we're about to find something incredible.
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This is the Blue Rivers.
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This is unbelievably beautiful, first of all.
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And only exists in the Antarctic summers.
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So liquid water like this does exist on the surface on Antarctica, but it's from the meltwater from the glaciers.
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And it's likely in liquid form for the first time in hundreds or even thousands of years.
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And I'm about to drink it.
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Man, that's good.
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That's really, genuinely delicious.
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Don't worry, and don't try this at home.
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The scientists with us told us that this water was safe to drink.
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There aren't any ancient bacteria in what we were drinking.
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But while these seasonal rivers of glacial melt are normal, Something not normal is happening to the ice around the coasts.
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Further out, around Antarctica, the ocean water is in the part of its cycle where it's melting, helping power the oceans.
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But during the winters now, less ice is reliably freezing around Antarctica.
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In 2023, it crashed to the lowest level ever recorded, and it hasn't bounced back,
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which is starting to disrupt those global currents that we all rely on.
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And this is just one small piece of how important this continent is.
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Breakdowns in Antarctica will disrupt weather patterns, meaning more intense storms, declines in global sea life and food supplies, destruction to ecosystems.
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This is what we are now facing.
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This is our version of that moment right before the Antarctic Treaty or the Montreal Protocol.
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But if you're thinking right now, the Antarctic Treaty couldn't possibly have been signed today, you might be right.
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But I've been thinking about something that Stephen, the scientist here, has been saying, which is the current future is not the future future.
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Meaning the path that we're on right now doesn't have to be the path that we're on tomorrow.
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And we're really at a tipping point.
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Our grandparents' generation came together and instead of turning Antarctica into a war zone, they signed the Antarctic Treaty.
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And our parents' generation came together and instead of allowing the ozone hole to get bigger, they signed the Montreal Protocol.
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Are we really gonna be the generation that doesn't work together to solve the next problem?
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Like, that.
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That can't possibly be the generation that we're going to be.
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As someone in that generation, not if we have anything to say about it.
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People have worked together to solve hard problems before.
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And we're going to do it again.
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I left Antarctica feeling so inspired by what people can do when they work together.
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If you want to see more optimistic science and tech stories, subscribe to support our show.
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Master English Speaking with the Ozone Hole Video: Context & Tips
The video takes viewers on a journey to Antarctica, blending science, history, and personal experience. It’s a rich resource for English learners, with conversational storytelling, technical terms, and emotional tone—perfect for practicing real-world language. Whether you’re prepping for IELTS speaking practice or aiming to sound more natural, this video offers diverse dialogue to mimic.
Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication
- "That wasn't by accident. It was a choice." – A concise way to explain intentional actions.
- "Do not take your sunglasses off." – Clear, urgent advice for everyday situations.
- "Nothing in Antarctica stays in Antarctica." – A memorable metaphor for global connections.
- "The current future is not the future future." – A creative phrase to discuss change.
- "We're really at a tipping point." – Useful for describing critical moments.
Step-by-Step Shadowing Guide for This Video
The shadowing technique (or "shadowspeak") works wonders here. Start by watching the video once to grasp the story. Then, play short 5-10 second clips and repeat them immediately, matching the speaker’s pace, intonation, and stress. Focus on phrases like "a mysterious massive hole" to practice linking words. For tricky parts, slow the video down—many platforms allow this. Next, record yourself and compare it to the original; note where your rhythm differs. This helps with IELTS speaking practice, as examiners value fluency and natural delivery. Finally, practice "shadow speak" with longer segments, like the section on the Antarctic Treaty, to build stamina. The video’s mix of casual and formal language makes it ideal for mastering versatility. With consistent practice, you’ll not only improve your speaking but also absorb fascinating science—win-win!
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | have been watching · I've been thinking |
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | If you lived anywhere here, you'd get |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have always worshipped · you've probably stopped · we've ever done |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is made · are allowed · was signed |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.