F. Sherwood Rowland
Frank Sherwood Rowland was an influential American chemist known for his groundbreaking research on atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and their role in depleting the Earth’s ozone layer. Born in 1927, Rowland displayed academic prowess from an early age, graduating high school at just fifteen and later earning degrees from Ohio Wesleyan University and the University of Chicago. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II before embarking on an academic career that included significant positions at Princeton University and the University of California, Irvine, where he was the founding chair of the Chemistry Department.
Rowland's most notable work began in the 1970s when he and his colleague Mario Molina studied the environmental impact of CFCs, leading to the discovery that these compounds threatened the ozone layer, which protects the Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation. Their findings, published in 1974, garnered widespread attention and contributed to significant legislative action, including the 1987 Montreal Protocol aimed at reducing CFC emissions globally. For their pivotal contributions, Rowland, Molina, and Dutch scientist Paul Crutzen were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995.
Throughout his career, Rowland published over four hundred scientific papers and received numerous accolades for his contributions to environmental science. His work not only raised awareness about ozone depletion but also laid the groundwork for ongoing research into climate change and global warming, issues that continue to be of paramount importance in today’s world. Rowland passed away in 2012, leaving behind a legacy as a pioneer in the fight against environmental degradation.
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F. Sherwood Rowland
American chemist and environmentalist
- Born: June 28, 1927
- Birthplace: Delaware, Ohio
Rowland was a key figure in global political efforts to control and reverse the pollution of Earth’s atmosphere by chlorofluorocarbon, or CFC, gases. With his colleagues, Rowland found that CFCs not only pollute the earth but also help to maintain the greenhouse effect, which has led to global warming and climate change.
Early Life
Frank Sherwood Rowland (ROH-land) was the second of three sons of Sidney Archie Rowland and Margaret Lois Drake Rowland. The year before his birth his father had left Union College in Schenectady, New York, to assume a professorship in mathematics and to chair the department at Ohio Wesleyan University in the city of Delaware, Ohio. Although a Democrat, Sidney was elected mayor of the Republican stronghold Delaware in the mid-1930s and served for two terms. Rowland’s mother, a University of Chicago graduate, taught high school in Indiana until she married Sidney in 1920.
Rowland's elementary school teachers were excellent instructors. He skipped fourth grade because of accelerated progress and entered high school at the age of twelve; he graduated a few weeks short of his sixteenth birthday. During several summer vacations, he had his first experiences with systematic data collection when his high school science teacher went on vacation and recruited Rowland to substitute for him as a volunteer at the local weather station, collecting information on temperatures and precipitation.
In the early years of World War II, Rowland, too young to serve in the military, attended Ohio Wesleyan, where he played basketball and baseball and earned four varsity letters. In 1945 he enlisted in the US Navy and served for fourteen months as a specialist third class. Two years after he left the Navy, in 1948, he received his bachelor’s degree from Ohio Wesleyan.
After graduation from Ohio Wesleyan, Rowland attended the University of Chicago and worked with Willard F. Libby, who had recently developed the carbon 14 dating technique for which he would receive the 1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Rowland received a master’s degree from Chicago in 1951. He focused on radiochemistry and wrote his PhD dissertation in 1952 on the chemical state of cyclotron-produced bromine atoms. He combined his academic work with sports, playing on university teams (Chicago graduate students at that time were permitted to do so) and earning four varsity letters. During summers he played with the Oshawa semiprofessional baseball club in Canada.
In 1952, Rowland married Joan Lundberg, a Chicago graduate as well. The Rowlands would have two children, a daughter, Ingrid Drake, and a son, Jeffrey Sherwood. The couple moved to Princeton University in the fall of 1952 after Rowland was hired as a chemistry instructor. Four years later, he was appointed an assistant professor at the University of Kansas and in time advanced to the rank of full professor. His research then was focused on the chemistry of radioactive atoms. In 1964, he accepted the position of founding chair of the Chemistry Department at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), which was scheduled to enroll its first students the following year. Rowland advanced to an endowed chair at UCI, as the Donald Bren Research Professor of Chemistry and Earth Systems Science.
Life’s Work
When Rowland retired in 1970 as chair of the Chemistry Department, he looked about for a field of research that would mesh with his growing interest in chemical problems in the environment. His work after retirement would be his legacy.
While attending a workshop sponsored by the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), Rowland became intrigued by data collected by researchers on a ship traveling between Great Britain and Antarctica. The scientists’ data showed the concentration of human-made chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) molecules in the atmosphere along that route. Rowland knew that the CFC molecules would not remain inert forever. The following year he requested and received funding from the AEC to work on the problem of what happens to atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons.
Late in 1973, Mario J. Molina, a recent graduate of the doctoral program at the University of California, Berkeley, joined Rowland’s research group as a postdoctoral fellow. Offered his choice of several research projects, Molina elected to concentrate on CFC issues with Rowland. Their investigations showed a potentially grave environmental threat involving the depletion of Earth’s stratospheric ozone layer. They documented that the CFC compounds used in aerosol sprays, air conditioners, refrigerators, and household items, as well as those emitted from factories and automobiles, were destroying the ozone layer that blocked the sun’s ultraviolet rays. In humans, ultraviolet radiation causes, among other problems, skin cancer, cataracts, sunburn, and excessive aging and wrinkling of the skin.
By late 1974, the year Rowland and Molina published their results in the journal Nature, there was strong public concern about ozone depletion. Legislative hearings and heavy media coverage followed. In the United States, a ban on the nonessential use of chlorofluorocarbons in aerosol sprays was announced on March 17, 1978, by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Food and Drug Administration. In May 1985, British researchers published a paper announcing they found an “ozone hole” above Antarctica, leading to more intense research on a global scale.
In 1995, Rowland, Molina, and Dutch atmospheric scientist Paul J. Crutzen were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their monumental work. Crutzen, who received his PhD from Stockholm University in 1973, worked at the Max-Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.
The American Chemical Society announced in 2006 that the initial scientific papers from the Rowland team regarding CFCs and the stratospheric ozone layer represented one of the ten most important advances in chemistry in the twentieth century. Over his long career, Rowland wrote more than four hundred scientific publications on atmospheric chemistry, radiochemistry, and chemical kinetics.
The University of California, Irvine, named its physical science building Rowland Hall. Rowland has been awarded the Tyler Prize in ecology (1983), the Charles Dana Award for Pioneering Achievements in Health (1987), the Japan Prize in environmental science and technology (1989), the Peter Debye Award in physical chemistry from the American Chemical Society (1993), and the Roger Revelle Medal of the American Geophysical Union (1994). He served from 1991 to 1994 as president-elect, president, and then chair of the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was foreign secretary of the National Academy of Sciences from 1994 to 2003. Rowland also was added to the Global Role of Honor of the United Nations Environmental Program.
In recognition of his achievements, Rowland also received numerous honorary doctorates from colleges and universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Italy, and Japan and awards from such institutions as Chicago, Duke, Ohio Wesleyan, Ohio State, Princeton, Simon Fraser, Clark, East Anglia, LaTrobe, Haverford, Carleton, and Whittier.
Rowland died on March 10, 2012, in Corona del Mar, California.
Significance
Rowland’s collaborative work on atmospheric alteration by CFCs alerted the world to stratospheric ozone depletion and the dangers it poses to the environment, to humans, and to plant and animal life. In 1987, the United Nations Environmental Program responded by forming an initiative that led to the highly successful Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. Signatories agreed to reduce their respective nations’ CFC production by 50 percent by 2000. Subsequent amendments to the protocol banned the production of CFCs in developed countries, which were responsible for virtually all these emissions. The developing world was given until 2010 to control CFC emissions.
Rowland and his team continued to work on the problems of global atmospheric pollution, with special attention to the growth in concentration of gases such as carbon dioxide, which can cause the Earth-warming greenhouse effect. The growth in global concentrations of atmospheric methane, another important greenhouse gas, showed a steady increase during the period from about 1880 into the 1950s and has since slowed to very small yearly increases. Researchers believe that repairs to deteriorated oil and gas facilities as well as slower growth or decreased emissions from coal mining and rice paddies have led to this decrease in atmospheric methane since the 1950s.
The Nobel committee’s press release that announced the awarding of the Nobel Prize in 1995 to Rowland, Molina, and Crutzen summed up their profound contributions: “By explaining the chemical mechanisms that affect the thickness of the ozone layer, the three researchers have contributed to our salvation from a global environmental problem that could have catastrophic consequences.” Global warming and climate change have since become critical concerns, and they remain major topics of debate among politicians, scientists, activists, business leaders, and the global community in general.
Bibliography
Attwood, George K., and Jeffrey A. Joens. “Ozone Depletion and Ozone Holes.” Ecology Basics, vol. 2. Pasadena: Salem, 2004. Print.
Jacobson, Mark Z. Air Pollution and Global Warming: History, Science, and Solutions. New York: Cambridge UP, 2012. Print.
Leory, Francis, ed. A Century of Nobel Prize Recipients: Chemistry, Physics, and Medicine. New York: Marcel Dekker, 2003. Print.
Lutgens, Frederick K., and Edward J. Tarbuck. The Atmosphere: An Introduction to Meteorology. 10th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2006. Print..
Parson, Edward A. Protecting the Ozone Layer: Science and Strategy. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. Print.
Rowland, F. Sherwood. “Stratospheric Ozone Depletion.” Annual Review of Physical Chemistry 42 (1991): 731–68. Print.
Rowland, F. Sherwood, and Donald R. Blake, “Urban Leakage of Liquefied Petroleum Gas and Its Impact on Air Quality in Mexico City.” Science 269 (1995): 53. Print.
Sagarin, Rafe, and Aníbal Pauchard. Observation and Ecology: Broadening the Scope of Science to Understand a Complex World. Washington: Island, 2012. Print.
Smith, Janice. General, Organic, and Biological Chemistry. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012. Print.
Snyder, Carl H. The Extraordinary Chemistry of Ordinary Things. 4th ed. Hoboken: Wiley, 2003. Print.