Paul Jozef Crutzen:
Birth:
December 3, 1933 in Amsterdam, Netherlands
Claim to Fame:
Crutzen is an Dutch chemist who shares the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario J. Molina for their research on the ozone layer. Rowland and Maria discovered that man-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were a major contributor to the destruction of ozone in the atmosphere. Crutzen's demonstrated the effect nitrous oxide had on the depletion of ozone. Nitrous oxide is largely unreactive and could rise high into the atmosphere and interact with ultraviolet light. This would begin a chain of reactions that where one product was converting ozone into molecular oxygen.
