Crutzen, Molina,
and Rowland were awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on stratospheric ozone.
In the following year, Crutzen and(independently) Harold Johnston suggested that NO emissions from supersonic passenger aircraft,
which would fly in the lower stratosphere, could also deplete the ozone layer.
In 1974 Frank Sherwood Rowland, Chemistry Professor at the University of California at Irvine, and his postdoctoral associate Mario J. Molina suggested that long-lived organic halogen compounds, such as CFCs,
might behave in a similar fashion as Crutzen had proposed for nitrous oxide.
Ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer subsequently used"anthropocene" with a different sense in the 1980s and the term was widely popularized in
2000 by atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen, who regards the influence of human behavior on Earth's
atmosphere in recent centuries as so significant as to constitute a new geological epoch.