Most of the people studying CFCs in the early 1970s were meteorologists or physicists, interested in tracking airborne CFCs for what they could tell science about the earth's air currents and other weather-related phenomena. Rowland and Molina, however, as chemists who had studied the relationship between gases and natural stimuli, understood that though CFC molecules might remain inert in the troposphere, they would be broken into their constituent atoms by the shorter waves of UV light in the stratosphere.