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posted by janrinok on Monday September 30 2019, @08:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the we-didn't-think-this-through dept.

[Editor's Note: The term benthic refers to anything associated with or occurring on the bottom of a body of water. The animals and plants that live on or in the bottom are known as the benthos. In ocean waters, nearshore and estuary areas are most frequently mapped.]

From the Great Pacific garbage patch to inland rivers, plastics are among the most widespread contaminants on Earth. Microplastics -- particles of plastic smaller than five millimeters -- are especially pervasive. As they build up in Earth's waters, microplastics are also becoming a permanent part of the planet's sedimentary layers.

Microplastics analyzed from nearshore and offshore benthic sediment samples in lakes, benthic sediment samples in rivers, and water samples in lakes and rivers.

Microplastic pellets from the Great Lakes study. The pellet study involved sampling of 66 beaches on each Great Lake over a two-week period in October 2018, with a total of 12,974 pellets on 660 square meters of beach.

Now, using the Great Lakes as a laboratory, sedimentary petrologist Patricia Corcoran and her students at the University of Western Ontario are studying the behavior of microplastics as a geologic phenomenon.

What are the main sources of microplastics to Great Lakes sediment? What factors influence their distribution, and where do they concentrate? To explore these questions, and shed light on implications such as which animals may be at risk from microplastics, Corcoran's team has analyzed offshore and nearshore sediment samples from Lakes Huron, Ontario, Erie, and St. Clair, and their tributaries.

Abundances were as high as 4270 microplastics particles per kilogram of dry weight sediment in lake sediment, and up to 2444 microplastic particles per kilogram in river sediment.


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Monday September 30 2019, @06:55PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday September 30 2019, @06:55PM (#900922) Journal

    When are they going to start wailing about all the rubber dust in the environment, and all the metal dust in the environment from all the humans running around driving cars, riding bikes, and wearing shoes? How long will it be before they get hysterical about all the carbon dioxide that humans exhale every day? I mean, it has to be billions of tons of the stuff, right? And think of the urine they micturate. And the feces! Once that stuff enters the environment, it stays forever. There's an even worse, silent killer that nobody's talking about: the shade that a human casts while walking around. They deprive innocent, holy natural grass and plants with the sunlight they need to live--just to SIMPLY LIVE!

    Yes, plastics are unsightly when they clutter up the environment. I don't want plastic grocery bags festooning the Joshua trees in the desert. I don't want to see plastic bottles floating in our rivers or lakes. But the stuff is inert and will wear down to dust through mechanical action eventually. The same thing will happen as has happened to all the glass and metal objects discarded by our parents and grandparents: it will return to the soil. Some people even now collect the "sea glass" for art projects, because it's cool. Future generations may marvel at the Pacific Garbage patch, at how what started out as refuse became colonized by life and turned into a thriving floating habitat.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
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