The ocean I unfortunately understand, what with all the plastic we throw in it. But I just read it was in fresh fallen antarctic snow! How?
In: 37
because plastic breaks down into smaller pieces and since they aren’t biodegradable, they stay where they are… and climates tend to change so when they do change they spread everywhere.
everyone overuses plastic and you will see plastic every where you go. it’s that bad that we even have microplastics inside us
Rain and snow are naturally full of microscopic crap.
Storms and winds whip up crap like dust, pollen, spores, and (now more recently) plastic microparticles into the air.
Then atmospheric winds carry that crap all over the planet.
Then water vapor in clouds condenses around the crap to form rain drops and snow flakes, and then the crap falls back down to earth.
Glitterbomb your room. In 10 years, when you are still finding glitter literally everywhere , from ontop the higest shelves to inside closed containers, remember this moment and imagine: microplastics are basically like a million times smaller than these glitter bits
They blow around in the wind, they can get carried by water. Importantly, they never go away. They can only turn into more smaller pieces.
[Here is the scientific paper you are talking about](https://tc.copernicus.org/articles/16/2127/2022/).
Section 2.1: you can see they were not collecting snow right as it fell, but they were collecting it from the top 2cm of the ground.
Section 3.3: you can see the size of the microplastic particles. I was surprised they found some as big as 2.4mm (about 0.1 inches) since I thought this was about. On the other hand, they only found one or two of those, out of many liters of snow.
Section 4.3 is where they talk about where they think these microplastics came from. They measured more microplastics closer to the research stations, so they think they are coming from there. For example, they say that when you wash clothes made of plastic, a few bits of plastic fiber break off and get washed down the train. Then they go through the sewage treatment plant, and into the river/sea/lake.
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-fishing-gear-is-biggest-plastic-polluter-in-ocean-finds-report](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-fishing-gear-is-biggest-plastic-polluter-in-ocean-finds-report)
The fishing industry is responsible for a large portion of the micro plastics found in the ocean and people eat a lot of seafood.
Part 1: Microplastics are microscopic tiny bits. They get blown into the air from…everywhere on land (roads, landfills etc) and then carried around the world in the air by atmospheric air currents.
Part 2: Whenever water is condensing in the air to form clouds, rain, or snow, each drop needs a tiny solid “seed” particle to start the condensation process. Usually it’s a speck of dust or pollen or something. But now that there’s tiny plastic fragments suspended in the air everywhere, rain and snow is condensing on those as well and bringing those plastic bits down to earth inside the raindrops and snowflakes when they fall.
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