The hole in the Earth’s ozone above Antarctica has reached a record size, leaving the continent completely exposed.

Between Sept. 21 and 30, the average area of the ozone hole was 10.6 million square miles, said Paul Newman, atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbel, Md., in a press release.

The chemicals that cause damage to the ozone layer last a long time; this is why the chemicals are still damaging the ozone, said William Gallus, professor of geological and atmospheric sciences.

“There’s a long residency time for some of those chemicals, so it’s going to take a long time for those chemicals to get out of the atmosphere,” he said.

Although most of the chemicals did not come from Antarctica, they were designed to be difficult to break down, which caused them to get up into the stratosphere where they then spread across the planet, said William Gutowski, professor of geological and atmospheric sciences.

With the onset of winter in Antarctica, a circular wall forms that prevents northern air from mixing with southern air. As a result, clouds form in the stratosphere that include ozone, according to Ecology.com.

There is a fluctuation in the size of the ozone hole from year to year, Gutowski said.

“What probably happened this year, then, is the weather patterns were just right so that the damaging effects of those leftover chemicals were able to make a bigger hole than in the past,” Gallus said.

According to a NASA press release, if the atmospheric weather conditions had been normal, the hole would have been expected to be about 8.9 to 9.3 million square miles. September’s temperatures in the lower stratosphere at the rim of Antarctica were cooler than usual, which increased the size of the hole, according to the release.

The hole in the ozone allows more ultraviolet radiation to reach the ground, which can cause an increase in the risk of skin cancer, Gutowski said.

“Especially people in the far southern part of the southern hemisphere would stand a greater risk of skin cancer,” Gallus said.

However, the only danger the ozone hole poses to people who don’t live in the far southern part of the southern hemisphere would be if it were part of a larger trend of ozone depletion, Gutowski said.

“The ozone hole itself doesn’t pose any direct danger elsewhere, although it’s one sign on how we may be causing changes causing the ozone to thin everywhere – and that could potentially be a problem for life elsewhere,” he said.

Ozone depletion doesn’t cause global warming – they’re mostly two separate issues, Gallus said.

“Generally speaking, changes in ozone have been a relatively minor factor in the global warming issue,” Gutowski said.

The fluctuations will continue for a while to come, Gallus said.

“It will take a long time to fix the damage that was done before, so most likely there’ll be these random situations could come up where the weather conditions just happen to be right this year,” he said. “But the general trend should be as time goes by the problem is going to get better, but there’ll still be these random peaks for a couple yeaArs where you might still set a record for the size.”

There are constantly series of chemical processes that will bring ozone up to certain levels, but these chemicals interrupt that process, Gutowski said. For regeneration to occur, these damaging chemicals must be out of the atmosphere.

“It’s not like anything new is happening to bring the ozone back, it’s just a matter of getting rid of something that was destroying the ozone in the first place,” Gutowski said.

Trying to speed up the ozone regeneration is like playing with fire, Gutowski said.

“The danger – as with anything – is if you try to make one specific change in the Earth’s climate system, you may have unintended consequences in some other place,” he said.