WWhen the wind picks up on Fair Isle, Britain’s most remote inhabited island, sea foam begins to drift across the fields like tumbleweeds. The pale yellow blob is so ubiquitous that it has a unique place in the island’s mythology, and is known as the butter churned by local troll Lucki Mini.
“When the Atlantic Ocean starts moving, the whole island is covered in bubbles,” says Tommy Hyndman, an artist who moved to Fair Isle from upstate New York 20 years ago. “The windows are stuck and all the plants are dying from the salt.”
Scientists now believe that sea foam and sea spray, as well as the well-known features of stormy weather, may hold the answer to Fair Isle’s mysteries. In 2024, public works data revealed that despite the island having no obvious industrial sources, this wild outpost known for its knitting and rare birds contained higher levels of toxic Pfas (‘forever chemicals’) than any other public drinking water supply in Scotland.
The Guardian obtained the individual PFA measurements behind the records, as well as documents from the Fair Isle airstrip and local fire department. Six scientists from Stockholm to Texas, via Liverpool and Aberdeen, reviewed the Guardian’s water data and agreed that Fair Isle’s lasting chemical fingerprints were consistent with a mixture of individual Pfas, likely arriving in splashes or bubbles.
PFA is commonly found near factories, fire stations, military bases, and airports. Scientists are now discovering them in remote coastal areas, but they believe they do not come from any individual source, but rather are carried thousands of miles in sea spray and foam.
All public drinking water in Scotland is below the official Pfas standard for safe consumption. But scientists say the data from Fair Isle and other coastal areas shows a worrying sign of how inadequate Britain’s current monitoring system is to record our footprint in the world’s oceans and its accumulation.
Foam forms in the waters around the south coast of Fair Isle. Photo: Daniel Shaler
“We think of the ocean as the ultimate sink. This is the only really effective way to remove persistent pollutants,” says environmental chemist Bo Sha from Stockholm University. He began studying how sea spray collects and transports Pfas over long distances nearly a decade ago. “But with Pfas, it’s like a pump that keeps pushing chemicals to the surface.”
Double quotes Once airborne in foam or spray, chemicals can travel hundreds of kilometers in a matter of days Beau Chat, Environmental Chemist
That’s because, unlike other persistent contaminants such as PCBs and DDT, Pfa is highly surface active and is attracted to the interface between water and air. Bubbles moving through seawater “collect” Pfas toward the seawater, Sha said, and in any given sample of seawater, the sea foam floating above would be expected to contain more Pfas than the water itself.
“When chemicals become airborne in foam or spray, they can travel hundreds of kilometers in a few days,” Sha said. Because Fair Island is often exposed to storm wave spray and is very small, PFA used remotely can accumulate in large quantities on Fair Island once it enters the ocean.
Scottish Water suggested in a statement that a fire at the island’s bird observatory in 2019 and the use of fire extinguishing foam on the small airstrip may have been the cause of the high readings. Records of the fire show that no foam was used to extinguish the fire, only sea water, and the National Trust for Scotland said it only uses Pfas-free foam at the airport.
Sea foam on the beach with strong winds at Sandwood Bay, Sutherland, Scotland. Photo: Ashley Cooper Photography/Alamy
Fair Isle is nothing special. Remote lakes across Scotland, from Orkney to the Western Isles, will no longer meet the EU’s proposed safe environmental level of Pfas. On the other side of the North Sea, a recent study in Denmark found that Pfas accumulates in groundwater and lichens near the coast due to sea spray and foam. Last year, scientists discovered that Pfas had blown against prevailing ocean currents into Antarctic seabirds living in some of the world’s most remote regions.
Fair Islanders had mixed reactions to the possible source of the chemicals. Kathy Cole, a traditional knitter and textile maker, has been filtering her water every night since the Pfas results were first released in 2024. Now she wants Scottish Water to do more to tackle what she calls “alarming” contamination at the island’s treatment plants.
Kathy Cole, knitter and textile maker; Photo: Daniel Shaler
“Water is one of the things you can’t live without. If you’re actively consuming something that’s not particularly good for your body, it makes sense to filter it,” she said, adding that given the levels on the island, she supports a program to conduct blood tests among locals. “No one wants to emphasize that because it can have a negative impact on tourism. But if you have such high levels, then do the testing.”
Dave Brackenbury, a retired engineer who lives at a lighthouse in the south of the island, is “skeptical” about the dangers of Pfas, but says the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (CEPA) should monitor Fair Isle more closely.
Sepa has not published Pfas data since 2018 and has yet to release analysis of its 2025 testing program, despite promising results by the end of the year. “There’s nothing you can do about it but watch,” Brackenberry says. “Sepa is unfortunate.”
A Sepa spokesperson said Sepa was still subject to “verification and validation checks” on its data, adding that it did not monitor airborne PFA. This is in line with other parts of the UK, said Andrew Sweetman, an environmental chemist at Lancaster University who helps run the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ (Defra) official air monitoring network.
“There is no systematic monitoring of Pfas in the air, and we hope that changes this year,” said Sweetman, who plans to add airborne Pfas monitors to part of the network. Few Defra sites in the 1990s were chosen with the ocean in mind. Only one, on Norfolk’s north coast, has been able to begin regularly measuring levels of Pfas reaching the shore in wave spray.
Dave Brackenbury is “skeptical” about the dangers of Pfas, but wants closer monitoring. Photo: Daniel Shaler
“We’re trying to think of quick and dirty ways to collect that data,” Sweetman said. “And if you draw a straight line from that location, there is nothing between that and the Arctic Circle.”
He added that understanding exactly how much Pfas was reaching Britain’s coastlines in wave spray was still only part of the puzzle. “The question is, is it a problem? And what can we do about it? Because it’s already too late. There is no longer any part of our environment that is untouched. We are contaminated almost everywhere.”
In December, the UK government pledged to prioritize “long-term planning efforts”. Kimo, an environmental network made up of local authorities in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Belgium and the UK, called this “inadequate” and published its own plan. The ministry directed local governments to identify coastal areas at risk of sea spray and begin moving livestock, farms and wells inland.
Sitting in an old manor house on Fair Isle, Hyndman is only a few hundred meters from the coast. He wasn’t surprised that contamination could reach far-flung places. He sees plastic washing up almost every day. Still, for those who moved to Fair Isle “to get away from it all,” the magnitude of our impact on the natural world was impressive.
“We all live in an environment and are under attack from environmental pollution wherever we are,” he says. “That’s the world we live in, and it’s a really scary world.”
Sea Foam in Shetland Islands waters – Research has found that sea spray and foam causes Pfas to accumulate in groundwater and lichens near the coast. Photo: Daniel Shaler
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