Chemistry Labs

Photo credit: Gobierno de Chile — File:Mario Molina (headshot).jpg (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 3.0 cl

Mario J. Molina

1943–2020 · Mexico, United States · Contemporary

Nobel Chemistry 1995

Mexican-born chemist who revealed how CFCs destroy stratospheric ozone, work that drove the global ban on those compounds.

Nobel Prize work

With F. Sherwood Rowland, Molina showed in 1974 that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) survive intact to the stratosphere, where ultraviolet light releases chlorine atoms that catalytically destroy ozone. Their work explained the threat to the ozone layer and led to the Montreal Protocol banning CFCs.

Fields

Physical chemistryEnvironmental, green and energy chemistry

Related topics

The ozone layer, the greenhouse effect

Stratospheric ozone shields life from ultraviolet radiation, while greenhouse gases absorb outgoing infrared radiation and warm the lower atmosphere. These distinct processes are explained through photochemistry, molecular vibrations and Earth’s radiative balance.

Photochemical reactions in the atmosphere

How sunlight initiates atmospheric reactions, creates and destroys ozone, and controls radical chemistry and pollutant lifetimes.

Chemists in the same field

Louis E. Brus (1943)Richard E. Smalley (1943)Jacques Dubochet (1942)M. Stanley Whittingham (1941)Aleksey Yekimov (1945)Ahmed Zewail (1946)