![]() It could also be that the plastic is getting degraded by the waves, sun, and salt down to a size that current methods are not detecting, but that could still have deleterious effects on humans and wildlife. The Allens’ new study offers early evidence that marine plastic could be making its way out of the ocean and into the atmosphere, and eventually traveling as far as the Pyrenees, but there are many other theories for where the missing plastic is hiding: in the bodies of fish, in soil, in yet-to-be-discovered “ hotspots” on the seafloor. “It’s 90 kilometers before you get to the next major city, and we were finding plastic falling out of the sky up there,” Steve Allen told Grist. Last year, they published findings of microplastics being deposited in the Pyrenees mountains, adding to the evidence that plastic can travel many miles in the atmosphere before landing back down on earth. They were inspired to study microplastics after sailing across the Pacific in 2010 and growing disturbed by the presence of plastic debris floating by, even when they were 1,000 miles from the nearest shore. The Allens are partners in research and in life. He and Deonie are hoping to get funding to conduct wave tank experiments in a lab setting to better understand how it works and how it might be different for plastic than for sea salt or algae. Steve Allen said that the same process of microplastic ejection is likely happening out at sea, and in other bodies of water like rivers and lakes. The researchers did a rough back-of-the envelope calculation extrapolating their findings out to coastlines around the world and estimated that about 136,000 tons of microplastics could be blown onshore annually. Microplastic particles were present in every sample, with the amount spiking on the last afternoon, when a thick mass of sea fog rose off the crashing waves and rolled into shore after a storm. They set up a sampling station on a dune about 30 feet above sea level and collected air samples over the course of eight days through a variety of weather conditions. To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. “And that it is all connected, in line with the hydrological cycle somehow.” (“Hydrological cycle” is a fancy name for the water cycle.) Last summer, Bergmann published a study that found evidence of microplastics in Arctic snow, and in that study she raised the question of whether some of it may have traveled from the sea to the atmosphere. “It shows that the ocean is not only a sink but also a source of microplastics,” Melanie Bergmann, a marine ecologist who was not involved in the study, told Grist in an email. A peer-reviewed study published in PLOS ONE this month backs up one theory for what could be happening to at least some of the missing plastic: Tiny particles are getting spat back out of the ocean and up into the atmosphere. ![]() ![]() ![]() But there’s an even more puzzling question for researchers who study plastic in the ocean: Where has it all gone?įield studies of marine plastic have accounted for only a small fraction of the material that scientists believe has been dumped into the seas, leading researchers to wonder where the rest of it is. A commonly cited figure - 8 million metric tons - comes from a decade-old estimate based on population and waste data, and scientists now believe the number could be significantly higher. Want to know how much plastic is entering the ocean every year? I regret to inform you that nobody knows. ![]()
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