F. SHERWOOD ROWLAND | 1927-2012
Delaware native discovered dangers of aerosol sprays
F. Sherwood Rowland received the Nobel Prize for showing that CFCs deplete the ozone layer.
F. Sherwood Rowland, who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry for helping discover that a chemical used in aerosol sprays, refrigerators and air conditioners was slowly destroying Earth’s ozone layer, died last week at his home in Corona del Mar, Calif. He was 84.
The native of Delaware, Ohio, and 1948 graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University had complications from Parkinson’s disease, according to a statement from the University of California at Irvine, where Rowland had worked since 1964.
Announcing that Rowland, Mario Molina and Paul Crutzen had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that the researchers had “contributed to our salvation from a global environmental problem that could have catastrophic consequences.”
The award was centered on the seminal findings that Rowland and Molina had made during the mid-1970s concerning chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs.
The compounds — nontoxic and nonflammable — were known for their considerable stability, which had made them ideal as propellants in household products. They were also used as refrigerants in air conditioners and refrigerators.
Rowland and Molina discovered that it was the CFCs’ stability, however, that also allowed them to waft — one spray at a time — high into the atmosphere near the ozone layer.
The researchers’ principal discovery was that the CFCs were thinning the ozone layer, without which plants and animals could not live on Earth’s surface. Moreover, the process would continue to get worse: CFCs were so hardy that they could linger in the air for 100 years.
Arriving home from his lab at the University of California at Irvine, Rowland told his wife: “ The work is going very well, but it looks like the end of the world.”
The work of Rowland and Molina “led to one of the world’s greatest environmental successes — the Montreal Protocol,” Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said. “It really saved the world from damaging UV rays. It did, I think, have a huge impact on atmospheric chemistry and also a huge humanitarian impact, as well.”
Frank Sherwood Rowland was born June 28, 1927, in Delaware, where his father was a mathematics professor at Ohio Wesleyan.
Rowland was a Navy radar operator during World War II and, after the war, he entered the University of Chicago as a chemistry graduate student.
He played varsity basketball at Ohio Wesleyan and was a semiprofessional baseball player for a Canadian team during his summers away from the University of Chicago.
Rowland died last Saturday. His survivors include his wife of 59 years, Joan Lundberg Rowland of Corona Del Mar; two children; and two grandchildren.