In what is another sign of how polluted our environment is with plastic, when Hurricane Larry veered north in the Atlantic Ocean in 2021, avoiding the East Coast of the United States, there was a special device waiting for it on the coast of Newfoundland. As hurricanes feed on warm ocean waters, scientists wondered whether such a storm could pick up microplastics from the surface of the sea and deposit them when it reached land. Larry was indeed the perfect storm: because it did not touch land before reaching the island, anything that fell from it would have been collected from the water or air, unlike a densely populated city where it is expected to have a lot of microplastics.
The Impact of Hurricane Larry on Newfoundland
When Larry passed over Newfoundland, the device captured what fell from the sky. This included rain, of course, but also large amounts of microplastics, defined as small pieces smaller than 5 mm, or about the width of a pencil eraser. At its peak, Larry was depositing more than 100,000 microplastic particles per square meter of land each day, researchers found in a recent paper published in the journal “Earth and Environmental Communications.” Thus, hurricanes can be added to the growing list of ways that tiny plastic particles infiltrate every corner of the environment, easily moving between land, sea, and air.
The Impact of Plastic on the Environment
As plastic production steadily increases due to human activity, the environment is becoming increasingly polluted with microplastics. The prevailing thought in the past was that microplastics would flow into the ocean and stay there: for example, washing synthetic clothes like polyester releases millions of microfibers in each wash cycle, which flow into the sea via wastewater. However, recent research has shown that seas actually release particles into the atmosphere to return and settle on land, either when waves break or when bubbles rise to the surface, casting microplastics into sea breezes.
The Impact of Hurricane Larry on Newfoundland
The device used in Newfoundland was quite simple: a glass cylinder containing a little bit of very pure water, firmly secured to the ground by wooden posts. Every six hours before, during, and after the hurricane, researchers would come and empty the water, which would have collected any particles falling – whether there was rain or not – on Newfoundland. “It’s a place that experiences a lot of severe weather events,” according to Earth scientist Anna Ryan from Dalhousie University, the lead author of the research paper. “And also, it’s a relatively remote place with very low population density. So you don’t have a lot of nearby sources of microplastics.”
The Impact of Hurricane Larry on Newfoundland
The team found that tens of thousands of plastic particles were falling on each square meter of land each day, both before and after Larry. But when the hurricane hit, those numbers rose to 113,000. “We found a lot of microplastics deposited during the peak of the hurricane,” according to Ryan, “but also, the total deposits were relatively high compared to previous studies.” Those studies were conducted under natural conditions, but in more remote locations, according to Ryan.
The Impact of Hurricane Larry on Newfoundland
The researchers also used a technique known as back trajectory modeling – a technique that simulates where the air reaching the device came from previously. This confirmed that Larry had picked up microplastics from the sea, lifted them into the air, and dropped them on Newfoundland. In fact, previous research estimates that between 12 and 21 million metric tons of microplastics are swirling in the top 200 meters of the Atlantic Ocean, and this was a very significant estimate because it did not account for microfibers. The Newfoundland study indicates that Larry occurred when it passed over the garbage patch in the North Atlantic Gyre, where floating plastic accumulates.
The Impact
Plastic and the Environment
These new findings from Newfoundland also confirm that they are extremely important estimates – and they should be. It is still difficult and costly to search for the smallest plastic particles: this study investigated plastic pieces the size of 1.2 microns (1.2 million parts per meter), but there are likely even smaller plastic pieces that fall into the system. “From previous studies, we know there is an upward curve in particle numbers as they get smaller,” according to microplastics researcher Steve Allen from the University of Birmingham, a co-author of the study. “So we were talking about 113,000 particles per square meter per day from the larger things. It must be astonishing for the smaller items.”
Impact of Plastic on the Environment
The researchers can also identify the types of plastic that have fallen from the sky. “We didn’t see a massive quantity of one type of polymer – there’s real diversity,” according to Ryan. “In the ocean, there’s a mix of particles that contains a little bit of everything. And also because the cyclone came from very far away: it formed off the west coast of Africa, and there could be particles that were captured from there.”
Impact of Plastic on the Environment
These findings confirm what other studies have found about microplastics in the environment. Microplastic pollution comes from many sources – our clothing, tire wear, paint chips, and shattered plastic bottles and bags – all of which get mixed into some kind of multi-polymer soup out there. This is true in the seas and in the sky: in the remote areas of the western U.S., microplastic sampling devices similar to those used in Newfoundland collected large numbers of particles falling as plastic rain. Microplastics have not only entered the atmosphere but have become an essential part of Earth’s atmosphere.
Impact of Plastic on the Environment
So, microplastics are not just flowing into the sea and staying there – they are moving into the atmosphere and back to land, then being picked up again by the winds and deposited back into the sea. Back and forth. “It has become abundantly clear that the exchange from ocean to atmosphere is very real,” according to Allen. “And the numbers in this paper are staggering. It arrives in Newfoundland at a time of year when all living things – in ponds and elsewhere – are trying to fatten up and breed for the winter.”
Impact of Plastic on the Environment
As microplastics easily travel on the winds and ocean currents, what were once considered pristine environments are no longer so. Scientists are racing to understand how these particles affect the organisms there. For example, microplastic pollution from Europe may have contaminated the Arctic, thereby polluting the Melosira arctica algae, which grows on the underside of sea ice. Algae are the foundational base of the food web in the Arctic, meaning all kinds of organisms consume them along with the accumulated microplastic.
Impact of Hurricane Larry on the Environment
As if hurricanes weren’t bad enough, they are another way for plastic particles to spread to places they shouldn’t be.
This story was originally published on wired.com.
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