Microplastics are permeating every part of the ocean, with particles found in upper ocean spray and lower ocean plains. this month, ios focuses on researchers using innovative techniques, modern datasets, and old-fashioned fieldwork to track these tiny invaders and help inform policies to better control them at global, regional, and municipal levels.
In “Tracking Microplastics Above and Below the Waves,” scientists and authors Salvador Reynoso-Cruz and Harry Alvarez-Ospina detail the movement of marine microplastics (MP) around the famous island of Cozumel on Mexico’s Caribbean coast. Their research tracks the plastic that drifts on the wind, eventually seeps into the ocean, and, more importantly, how some members of Congress find their way back into the atmosphere. Reynoso Cruces and Álvarez Ospina investigated this understudied pathway, revealing “when the ocean acts as a source of airborne particles, which types of plastic are most likely to be exchanged, and how local winds and ocean currents shape where the particles end up.”
While Reynoso Cruces and Álvarez Ospina mostly stick to the sunny zone, their scientists and authors Shaie Zhao, Luisa Galgani, and Karin Cubare have dived deep into the water column with their “Measurement of Microplastics in All Ocean Layers.” Reducing microplastics and nanoplastics not only introduces toxins into delicate biota; It can also disrupt the density of falling organic particles and, as a result, disrupt ocean carbon transport. Zhao and his co-authors are advancing important work in an area where “no consistent method for sampling and analyzing subsurface plastics currently exists.”
The ubiquity of plastic in our daily lives can increase the number of ways plastics enter aquatic ecosystems. Tire particles are entering the estuary. Nanoplastics from alpine trekking equipment are accumulating in a remote lake in the Himalayas. Old weapons from World War II are polluting the Baltic Sea.
Scientists are helping policymakers put the microplastic invasion into perspective by better understanding where microplastics come from, where they go, and how they get there.
—Caryl Sue Michalizio, Editor-in-Chief
