Plastic can take a long time to break down and decompose. Combine that with the fact that plastic is being found everywhere and microplastics have even been found in the human body, and you have quite the recipe for disaster. Now, it turns out the situation is even worse than we thought, as research has revealed that tons of invisible plastics are also just floating around in the ocean.
We already knew that microplastics were a huge problem, and that plastic pollution in the oceans has been out of hand for decades now, but a new study published in the journal Nature suggests things may be even more dire than we thought. According to that study, there may be tons of nanoplastics — plastics so small they’re basically invisible — floating throughout the ocean.
Invisible to the naked eye
By definition, nanoplastics are smaller than one micrometer across, making them roughly the same size as small bacteria. Scientists have been concerned about these invisible plastics for years, but we’ve never had the technology to go looking for them because of how small they are. However, last year, another study showed that we’d made more than enough technological advances to get a good idea of what they look like, so that we can successfully observe them in the ocean.
Finding nanoplastics was expected, but the researchers said the amount found in the ocean was the unexpected part. For now, the only real observation we have of nanoplastics in the ocean is through the tests taken by these researchers. They gathered ocean water and dried it in an evaporation chamber. Then, they heated up the vials until the fragments of plastic burned, releasing signature molecules the researchers were able to identify using a mass spectrometer.
It’s certainly an intriguing way to go about looking at these invisible plastics and how pervasive they are in our oceans. But it’s also one that gives even more weight to the concerns the United Nations and others have been raising when it comes to plastic pollution. Things are bad right now, and if we don’t find a suitable replacement for plastic or a better way to break down plastic soon, then things will just get worse.
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