https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/microplastics-in-national-parks
"The Grand Canyon is vast and magnificently unsubtle: The 277-mile gash
has long humbled visitors with its sheer rock walls and the river
ribboning below. The landscape is also cloaked with something much, much
smaller, but just as humbling. A team of researchers has found that the
Grand Canyon—along with 10 other protected patches of the United
States—is lousy with microplastics.
Plastics more famously menace the watery parts of the world. In the
oceans, ghostly plastic bags ensnare corals and little chunks swirl in
small eddies and much wider gyres, and pieces of all sizes wash up on
beaches en masse. Microplastics, among the tiniest of bits, routinely
tumble through sewers, and slough off of bobbing garbage or fishing
nets. They’re even embedded in ocean-floor sediment. But they’re pretty
much everywhere, even on land. Writing in Science, a team of researchers
led by Janice Brahney, a biogeochemist at Utah State University,
recently reported that microplastics can drift far and wide in the air
and drop from the sky. The researchers found that more than 1,000 tons
of microplastics—the equivalent of somewhere between 120 million and 300
million plastic bottles—fall across 11 protected areas in the American
West each year, including such prized natural areas as the Craters of
the Moon in Idaho, Joshua Tree in California, and Canyonlands in Utah."
Via Stuart Richman.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://www.xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
http://www.glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
http://www.sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
