cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24559804
A new study finds there are 27 million metric tons of invisible plastic particles in the North Atlantic alone.
In the oceans, the most widespread type of plastic pollution may be the kind you can’t see.
A new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature estimates that the North Atlantic Ocean alone contains 27 million metric tons of nanoplastic — plastic particles 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair. That figure is 10 times higher than previous estimates of plastic pollution of all sizes across all the world’s oceans, according to the study’s authors.
Microplastics range in width between 0.001 millimeters and 5 millimeters, making them up to 5 million times bigger than nanoplastics.
I hate this type of dumbed down description with the actual info removed. It’s like when someone describes the capacity of a hard drive in terms of “libraries of congress” or “feet of stacked paper” instead of gigabytes or terabytes. We all use hard drives and know what a terabyte is, so give us the plain info.
Anyway, clicking the Nature link shows that nanoplastic means less than 1 micron diameter. That’s much simpler than making us look up the diameter of a human hair to find out how big the plastic is.