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Microplastics Are Swirling Around in the Atmosphere, Where They Might Be Contributing to Climate Change
Key takeaways
- They’ve been found in our lakes, soil and food, and they even float in the air, traveling across the globe.
- Colorful bits absorb more sunlight than they reflect, which can heat the surrounding air, researchers report May 4 in the journal Nature Climate Change.
- Plastic particles less than five millimeters long, or smaller than a pencil top eraser, are considered microplastics.
They’ve been found in our lakes, soil and food, and they even float in the air, traveling across the globe. Now, new research suggests that microplastics swirling in the atmosphere are contributing to the warming of our world.
Colorful bits absorb more sunlight than they reflect, which can heat the surrounding air, researchers report May 4 in the journal Nature Climate Change. The findings suggest that airborne plastic particles might play a larger role in climate change than previously thought, and that they should be more widely included in climate assessments.
“This article shows a very worrying truth about the dangers of micro- and nanoplastics,” says Steve Allen, a microplastics researcher at the environmental advocacy organization Healthy Earth, to Scientific American’s Jackie Flynn Mogensen. Allen was not involved in the study.