Lucy Carpenter in Podcasts

She discovered that for various reasons the ocean actively changes the chemistry of the air above it, and in doing so can influence ozone, methane, aerosols, clouds and ultimately the climate itself. Today the Cape Verde Observatory has become one of the world's most important atmospheric study sites, while Lucy's career has taken her from that remote island to co-chairing the scientific panel for the Montreal Protocol, the ongoing international agreement to protect our planet's ozone layer.

Lucy was one of the founding scientists behind the Cape Verde Atmospheric Observatory, established on Salvatente in 2006. It was measurements at this site that paved the way for a significant revelation that ozone loss is not only a human-made problem. The chemistry of the sea has an impact as well.

Hello! We begin today in the mid-Atlantic on the island of Sao Vicente in Cape Verde, a place of trade winds and lava fields where the air blowing inland has spent days travelling over open ocean. Clean air, the kind that atmospheric chemists dream of. Atmospheric chemists such as Lucy Carpenter, professor at the University of York, who studies how chemical interactions impact our climate.