| RefNo | EC/2004/50 |
| Level | Item |
| Title | Rowland, Frank Sherwood: certificate of election to the Royal Society |
| Description | Citation word processed and pasted on to certificate. For updated citation see 2004 candidates book. |
| Proposers | Sherwood Rowland has made pioneering contributions to two areas of chemistry. Firstly in identifying the chemical processes undergone by the high-energy fragments released by a nuclear reaction in a molecule, which then recoil and are deactivated step-by-step. Rowland has been the leading figure in working out the physical and chemical details of these unusual systems. A wide range of nuclear-recoil studies was made in solid, liquid, and gaseous phases, and multiple isotopic tracers were ingeniously utilised to identify all major products. In usual thermal reactions, only those molecules having energy greater than a threshold value are able to react. In nuclear-recoil kinetics, certain reactions can occur only if the hot fragment is deactivated below some ceiling value. Rowland successfully explained atom-exchange reactions including those with retention or inversion of configuration as well as atom-abstraction reactions by hot tritium and chlorine. Many of Rowland's studies of nuclear-recoil reactions involved halogen-substituted methanes, and his second major contribution came when he realised that chlorofluoromethanes, strictly man-made substances, were accumulating world-wide in the atmosphere and that their dominant removal process would be transport to the stratosphere where their decomposition yields chlorine atoms which catalytically destroy ozone. In 1974, Rowland and Molina predicted that continued use of these substances as refrigerants and aerosol propellants, etc, would result in serious long-term depletion of stratospheric ozone. This postulate initiated many field and laboratory studies which have confirmed their predictions and led to the Montreal Protocol, the first international agreement to tackle a global pollution problem. For this work they were awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Rowland has been a notable contributor to these subsequent studies, identifying the importance of chlorine nitrate which is now known to play an important role in ozone holes. He also realised that measurements of the tropospheric abundance of the wholly anthropogenic hydrocarbon methyl chloroform would provide a value for the average concentration of the OH radical, which is the dominant atmospheric scavenger. Another important contribution was his measurements of tropospheric methane and the identification of its increase which has considerable consequences for atmospheric chemistry and for global warming. He is Foreign Secretary of the US National Academy of Sciences. |
| Extent | 1 sheet |
| AccessStatus | Closed |
Fellows associated with this archive
| Code | PersonName | Dates |
| NA8774 | Rowland; Frank Sherwood (1927 - 2012) | 1927 - 2012 |