The Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding (MIPAS)

“We no longer live in the Holocene, we live in the Anthropocene—in an era shaped by the actions of humankind,” says Paul Crutzen, atmospheric chemist and Nobel Prize winner. Evidence of this new geological era of humans can be found in the atmosphere. For instance, the Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding, a Fourier transform spectrometer onboard Europe’s environmental research satellite ENVISAT, can detect 30 different trace gases in the atmosphere, which could provide information on global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer. In the 1980s, the findings of Crutzen and his team were used as the basis for the Montreal Protocol’s ban on the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), identified as the primary cause for the hole in the ozone layer. Without this ban, the ozone layer, which absorbs most of the sun’s UV radiation, would likely be completely depleted within the next 40 years.