On October 1st, 2002 the World Meteological Organization announced that the Ozone "Hole" over Antartica had split in two.

In 2000

A NASA instrument has detected an Antarctic ozone "hole" (what scientists call an "ozone depletion area") that is three times larger than the entire land mass of the United States-the largest such area ever observed.

The "hole" expanded to a record size of approximately 11 million square miles (28.3 million square kilometers) on Sept. 3, 2000. The previous record was approximately 10.5 million square miles (27.2 million square km) on Sept. 19, 1998.

Image courtesy the TOMS science team & and the Scientific Visualization Studio, NASA GSFC