MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 93 of 100

Correct — option (1), The Netherlands. Paul Jozef Crutzen was Dutch. He was born in Amsterdam on 3 December 1933 and remained a citizen of the Netherlands for his whole life, although he spent the greater part of his working career elsewhere. In 1995 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland for their work in atmospheric chemistry, and particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone — a body of research that showed how a handful of trace gases released at ground level could destroy the stratospheric ozone layer, and which gave the scientific foundation for the Montreal Protocol. Crutzen's own contribution was to demonstrate that oxides of nitrogen accelerate the breakdown of ozone catalytically, before Molina and Rowland showed that chlorofluorocarbons did the same. He is also the man responsible for the word in the stem. In 2000, with the biologist Eugene F. Stoermer, he proposed the term 'Anthropocene' for a new geological epoch in which human activity has become the dominant influence on the earth's systems, suggesting the latter part of the eighteenth century as its beginning; the term has since travelled far beyond geology and supplies the title of the very report examined a few questions earlier in this paper. He died on 28 January 2021, in Mainz in Germany, a year before this paper was written. That German connection is the whole difficulty of the question, and it is dealt with in the note on the second option. Two printing points, both reproduced rather than corrected. The English stem ends with a colon while the Marathi stem is a fill-in-the-blank with an underscore rule; and the Marathi column spells the term अँथ्रोपोसिन here while spelling the same word अँथ्रोपोसीन in the earlier question about the Human Development Report. Neither affects the answer, which is option (1).

• (2)Germany — Germany is the trap the question is built around, and it is a fair one, because Crutzen's professional life really was German. From 1980 he worked in the Department of Atmospheric Chemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, where he remained until his death in 2021, and it was there that most of the work associated with his name was directed and where he died. A candidate who knows where he worked, or who remembers the Max Planck Institute from the Nobel citation, will answer Germany with confidence. But the stem asks what he was a citizen OF, not where he worked, and on that question the answer is fixed by his birth in Amsterdam in 1933 and his Dutch nationality. Scientists are frequently examined on this distinction because so many of them work outside their own countries; read the operative word in the stem — citizen, born, worked, affiliated — before choosing.
• (3)France — France has no connection with Paul Crutzen. It is present as a plausible European alternative for a candidate who knows only that the scientist in question was European and is guessing among the continent's larger countries. What can be said usefully about the option is what it should remind a candidate of: the ozone story is an international one whose principal names are worth attaching to their countries, since the 1995 chemistry prize was shared by a Dutchman, Crutzen, a Mexican, Mario Molina, and an American, F. Sherwood Rowland. That distribution of nationalities is itself a plausible question, and knowing it removes any temptation to guess a country because it sounds scientific.
• (4)Poland — Poland likewise has nothing to do with Crutzen, and the option functions in the same way as France — a European country offered to absorb the guesses of a candidate who has no recall of the man at all. The distinctive fact that answers the question is small and easy to hold: Crutzen was born in Amsterdam and was Dutch, while his laboratory for the last forty years of his life was in Germany. If the two are stored together as a pair, neither France nor Poland can attract a moment's consideration, and the German option loses its power as well. That is the general form of defence against a nationality question: store the nationality and the place of work together, because the examiner will ask for whichever of the two the candidate is less likely to have.

Paul Crutzen sits at the junction of two subjects that MPSC examines separately. The first is the depletion of the ozone layer. Ozone in the stratosphere, roughly between fifteen and thirty-five kilometres up, absorbs almost all of the sun's ultraviolet-C and most of its ultraviolet-B radiation, and the discovery in the 1970s that human-made gases could destroy it catalytically was one of the great results of twentieth-century environmental science. Crutzen showed the catalytic role of nitrogen oxides; Molina and Rowland showed in 1974 that chlorofluorocarbons drifting into the stratosphere would release chlorine atoms which would do the same; the three shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995. The Antarctic ozone hole was reported in 1985, the Montreal Protocol was adopted on 16 September 1987, and that date is now observed as the International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer. The second subject is the Anthropocene, the proposal Crutzen made with Eugene Stoermer in 2000 that human activity has become the dominant force shaping the earth's systems and that this warrants a new epoch in the geological time scale after the Holocene. The term is now standard in policy language — the UNDP's Human Development Report of 2020 is titled 'The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene' — but it has not been formally ratified as a division of geological time. Crutzen's career is therefore a link between the ozone regime, which is generally regarded as the most successful international environmental agreement, and the far harder problem of climate and planetary pressures, for which no comparable success exists.

This question belongs to a small but persistent MPSC category — a named scientist, and a fact about him that is not scientific at all. The Commission asks for a nationality, a prize year, a discovery or a term coined, and the candidate is expected to have a one-line entry for each of the figures who appear in the environment and science syllabus. It is worth noticing how this paper has arranged its material: the Anthropocene appears twice, once through the Human Development Report and once through the man who named it, and the second question is answerable partly from the first. That is a common MPSC habit and it rewards reading around a theme rather than memorising isolated facts, because two or three questions in the same paper often come from the same short news cycle or the same textbook chapter. It also rewards care with the operative word of a stem. Here the word is 'citizen', and everything else in the sentence — the term he used, the prize he won, the year — is scaffolding to identify the man rather than to answer the question. Candidates lose this mark by answering a different question from the one asked, which is a far commoner failure in the examination hall than ignorance.

• Paul Jozef Crutzen was Dutch, born in Amsterdam on 3 December 1933, and died on 28 January 2021 at Mainz in Germany.
• He shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland for work in atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone; his own contribution concerned the catalytic role of nitrogen oxides in destroying stratospheric ozone.
• From 1980 until his death he worked in the Department of Atmospheric Chemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany — the fact that makes 'Germany' the strongest wrong option in this question.
• In 2000, with Eugene F. Stoermer, he proposed the term 'Anthropocene' for a geological epoch dominated by human activity, suggesting the latter part of the eighteenth century as its start; the term is widely used but has not been formally ratified into the geological time scale.
• The paper's Marathi column spells the term अँथ्रोपोसिन in this question and अँथ्रोपोसीन in the earlier question on the Human Development Report — the same word, printed two different ways, and reproduced as printed in both.

• Answering with the country a scientist worked in rather than the country he was a citizen of. Crutzen's laboratory was at Mainz in Germany from 1980 until his death, and his citizenship was Dutch throughout
• Confusing the ozone regime with the climate regime. The Montreal Protocol deals with ozone-depleting substances; the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement deal with greenhouse gases, and the Kigali Amendment straddles the two
• Treating the Anthropocene as an officially recognised epoch. It was proposed in 2000 and is in general use, but it has not been ratified as a division of geological time
• Attributing the discovery of the chlorofluorocarbon effect to Crutzen. His own work concerned nitrogen oxides; Molina and Rowland showed the CFC pathway, and the three shared the prize

Scientists enter MPSC papers through their nationality, their prize, their year and the term or theory attached to their name, and almost never through the substance of their science. That makes the preparation compact: for every figure who appears in the environment, science or technology sections, a candidate needs a line carrying name, country, prize and year, and the single idea associated with them. The Commission then builds questions by asking for whichever element is least likely to have been noted — usually the nationality, because most candidates remember the discovery and not the passport. Expect also the paired question, in which one item asks about a concept and another in the same paper asks about the person behind it, as happens here with the Anthropocene. Reading a topic properly once therefore yields two marks rather than one, which is the strongest argument against learning current affairs as disconnected bullet points.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Paul J. Crutzen, Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland for their work on which of the following ?

  • (a)The greenhouse effect and global warming
  • (b)Atmospheric chemistry, particularly the formation and decomposition of ozone
  • (c)The chemistry of acid rain
  • (d)The discovery of the structure of the ozone molecule

  Answer(b) Atmospheric chemistry, particularly the formation and decomposition of ozone. Crutzen showed that nitrogen oxides destroy stratospheric ozone catalytically, and Molina and Rowland showed in 1974 that chlorofluorocarbons release chlorine in the stratosphere and do the same; together their work explained how gases released at ground level could thin the ozone layer, and it provided the scientific basis for the Montreal Protocol adopted on 16 September 1987.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The term 'Anthropocene' was proposed in 2000 by Paul J. Crutzen along with which of the following, and for what purpose ?

  • (a)Mario Molina, for a new classification of greenhouse gases
  • (b)Eugene F. Stoermer, for a geological epoch dominated by human activity
  • (c)F. Sherwood Rowland, for a measure of ozone depletion
  • (d)James Lovelock, for a theory of the earth as a self-regulating system

  Answer(b) Eugene F. Stoermer, for a geological epoch dominated by human activity. The two proposed the term for a new epoch following the Holocene, suggesting the latter part of the eighteenth century as its beginning, on the ground that human activity had become the dominant influence on the earth's systems. The term is now used widely in science and policy — it supplies the title of the UNDP's Human Development Report 2020 — but it has not been formally ratified into the geological time scale.