Chemistry Labs

Photo credit: Teemu Rajala — File:Paul Crutzen.jpg (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 3.0

Paul J. Crutzen

1933–2021 · Netherlands · 20th century

Nobel Chemistry 1995

Dutch atmospheric chemist who explained ozone destruction by nitrogen oxides and later coined the term 'Anthropocene'.

Nobel Prize work

Crutzen showed that nitrogen oxides act as catalysts destroying stratospheric ozone, and helped explain how human emissions — later linked to CFCs and the Antarctic ozone hole — thin the ozone layer. His work on atmospheric photochemistry, shared with Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland, underpinned the Montreal Protocol that phased out ozone-depleting substances.

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.

Atmospheric chemistry models

How box and three-dimensional models combine atmospheric transport, emissions, chemical mechanisms and observations to explain pollutant and climate-relevant species.

Chemists in the same field

Richard R. Ernst (1933)Robert Curl (1933)Dudley R. Herschbach (1932)Gerhard Ertl (1936)Yuan T. Lee (1936)John Charles Polanyi (1929)