Good news!

According to a new study published in the journal Science, the ozone layer hole in the Antarctic is shrinking. It has shrunk “more than 1.5 million square miles (or 4 million square kilometers) — about about half the area of the contiguous United States — since its peak in 2000.”

Of course, tree huggers attribute the good news to the measures we’ve implemented over the past few years. You know– modifying shower behavior and whatnot.

“We can now be confident that the things we’ve done have put the planet on a path to heal,” the study’s lead author Susan Solomon of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said in a statement. “Which is pretty good for us, isn’t it? Aren’t we amazing humans, that we did something that created a situation that we decided collectively, as a world, ‘Let’s get rid of these molecules’? We got rid of them, and now we’re seeing the planet respond.”… read more here