She showed that there was a large spread in values and that the scheme used before was too simple. Her thesis results met with some resistance from these other groups, but her results were ultimately published and, behold, the others have fallen into line and conceded that their former methods were, indeed, too simple. Feeling that she knew a lot about what she had worked on, but wanting a broader experience in atmospheric chemistry, she came to Chicago and Jon Abbatt s lab. Here she is working on a problem in arctic ozone destruction. In the arctic springtime, tropospheric ozone levels sometimes decrease rapidly.
Tropospheric ozone is the ozone that is harmful to health.
The hypothesis is that the element bromine, probably coming from arctic sea water, acts as a catalyst to destroy ozone. The only way to test this is to do experiments. She is running experiments using a flow tube. Its walls are coated with ice that is doped with different concentrations of sodium bromide or artifical sea water. She flows chlorine or bromine compounds, which she prepares herself using a vacuum distillation process, through the tube.