It is unfortunately well-known that microplastics are pretty much everywhere on Earth. They are also increasingly found in living things like birds and dolphins as well as in human brains and placentas. The oceans are polluted with plastic, and for the first time, there is now an estimate for the volume of nanoplastics – which are even smaller than microplastics and invisible to the human eye – found in the North Atlantic.
According to a study published in the journal Nature by the microplastics and nanoplastics research group at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research in Germany, there are at least 30 million tons of nanoplastics in the North Atlantic, which is more than the weight of all wild land mammals on Earth.
The same researchers have analyzed plastic in lakes, urban air, and even the air in very remote places, but the new study reveals a missing part of the plastics story.
Nanoplastics are microscopic fragments smaller than one micron, about the size of small bacteria. There has been ongoing concern about nanoplastics in ocean water, but there wasn’t the technology available to really investigate it. While nanoplastics were expected to be found in the ocean, the sheer amount of it was surprising.
The average concentration of nanoplastics near coastlines is about 25 milligrams per cubic meter of water, about the weight of a single large bird feather. Nanoplastics are tiny enough that they can easily infiltrate the bodies of living creatures. For fish and other ocean animals, that means constant exposure that builds up over time.
It is highly unlikely that plastic pollution is going to stop any time soon, but there is a United Nations meeting on the subject in August in Geneva.
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Tons of Invisible Plastic Pieces Lurk in Ocean Water
Photo, posted June 24, 2020, courtesy of G.P. Schmal / NOAA via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio
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