Word: punta
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...this time of year, the Cabo de Hornos Hotel in Punta Arenas (pop. 100,000) is ordinarily filled with tourists who spend their days browsing in the local tax-free shops or mounting expeditions into the rugged, mountainous countryside just out of town. But the 120 mostly American scientists and technicians who converged on Chile's southernmost city for most of August and September ignored advertisements for hunting, hiking and ski tours. Instead, each day they scanned the bulletin board in the hotel lobby for the latest information on a different sort of venture...
Thirteen times during their eight-week stay, a specially outfitted DC-8 took off from the Presidente Ibanez Airport, twelve miles northeast of Punta Arenas. Often the 40-odd scientists and support crew listed for a given flight had to leave the hotel soon after midnight to prepare the plane and its research instruments. Once airborne, the DC-8 would bank south toward Antarctica, 1,000 miles away, fighting vicious winds before settling into a twelve-hour round-trip flight at altitudes of up to 40,000 ft. Along the way, the instruments continuously collected data on atmospheric gases, airborne...
...Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., announced that his ground-based observations as a member of the 1986 Antarctic National Ozone Expedition pointed directly to a CFC-ozone link. "The evidence isn't final," he said, "but it's strong enough." Earlier this month, results from NASA's Punta Arenas project confirmed the bad news. Not only was the ozone hole more severely depleted than ever before -- fully 50% of the gas had disappeared during the polar thaw, compared with the previous high of 40%, in 1985 -- but the CFC connection was more evident. Notes Sherwood Rowland, a chemist...
...while most scientists agree that atmospheric chemistry and dynamics are major causes, the increased scrutiny of the Antarctic atmosphere following the discovery of the hole has seriously undercut the sunspot theory. Data from Punta Arenas, says Robert Watson, a NASA scientist involved in that study, made the verdict all but final. Nitrogen and ozone levels were down, but concentrations of chlorine monoxide were 100 times as great as equivalent levels at temperate latitudes. Says Watson: "We can forget the solar theories. We can no longer debate that chlorine monoxide exists and that its abundance is high enough to destroy ozone...
...plane around during landings. With special scientific instruments installed in pods on its long, droopy wings, the ER-2 is "like a big albatross -- it's heavy-winged," says Operations Manager James Cherbonneaux of NASA's Ames Research Center. While watching a particularly hairy approach to the runway at Punta Arenas, he recalls, "I chewed a little bit of my heart...