We have written more than once that plastic is a serious threat to life on Earth. Thus, more than half of the inhabitants of the sea and ocean depths, including plankton, feed on microplastics. The world press regularly reports about animals with kilograms of plastic in their stomachs. However, the problems do not end there. Scientists have found that snow in the Arctic falls along with particles of plastic. But how is this possible?
What's going on in the Arctic?
Because of global warming, the Arctic is rapidly losing ice. But the Arctic accounts for about 10 percent of all ice reserves on Earth. Despite the fact that the amount of ice is constantly changing with the seasons, the World Meteorological Organization has estimated that over the past 30 years, the Arctic Ocean has lost 95 percent of its perennial ice.
It turns out that the territory of the Arctic in 2017 alone lost about 260 thousand square kilometers of ice. Melting Arctic ice is endangering the lives of endangered polar bears. Among other things, it affects sea level rise and affects the climate around the planet.
How did the plastic get into the snow?
The work of German and Swiss scientists is published in The Journal of Science Advances. The researchers were shocked by the amount of microscopic plastic particles found in the Arctic snow samples. There were about 10 thousand particles per liter.
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Until now, it was believed that the Arctic is one of the few regions on Earth that is not polluted by plastic. The study's lead author, Dr. Melanie Bergman, expected to find some plastic particles in the samples, but not 10,000 particles per liter. According to Dr. Bergman, the particles of microplastics got into the Arctic snow from the air.
What is microplastics?
Microplastics are considered to be particles no larger than 5 mm. Scientists have long known that the planet's air is polluted with microscopic plastic particles. However, scientists cannot say to what extent these particles contained in the air are dangerous to health and whether they are dangerous at all.
In Arctic snow samples, some of the plastic particles were so small that scientists were unable to understand their origin. The researchers also took snow samples from Germany and Switzerland. It turned out that urban snow contains much more plastic than arctic snow.
Lyubov Sokovikova