New Study Finds Microplastics in Sea Breeze

The sea breeze that you are breathing is laden with microplastics, a new study suggests.

A study found microplastics in the ocean air along the southwest Atlantic Coast of France. According to the study, the microplastics are released into the atmosphere through "bubble burst ejection." The bubbles carry with them air, salts, bacteria, other particles, and microplastics to the ocean's surface. As ocean waves break into the surface, consequently bursting the bubbles and ejecting it into the winds.

The study also suggests some disturbing facts. An estimated 136,000 tons of microplastics are released every year through sea spray. Researchers found 19 microplastic fragments in each cubic meter of air along the Bay of Biscay in Aquitaine, France. According to Deonie Allen and Steve Allen, the lead co-authors of the study, the figures cited are high, considering that the body of water is not especially polluted.

Deonie Allen and Steve Allen, the lead co-authors of the study, are part of the researchers from the University of Strathclyde and  Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées at the University of Toulouse entitled, Examination of the Ocean as a Source for Atmospheric Microplastics. Their study was published in Plos One on May 12.

What are microplastics?

Microplastics, as its name implied, are minute plastic particles that are less than five millimeters long.  It comes either the larger plastics that degrade into smaller pieces;  or the microbeads, the very tiny pieces of manufactured polyethylene plastics that are present in beauty products such as exfoliants in cleansers and toothpaste for the past fifty years. In 2015, a law,  Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015, banned the use of microbeads in cosmetics and personal care products.

Because of the minute size of microplastics, it can easily pass through water inflation systems and eventually find its way to the oceans and lakes, thereby threatening aquatic life.  Scientists have reported the presence of microplastics everywhere - in the soil, the deep sea, the highest peak, table salt, marine mammals, and even human stool. Microplastics were even discovered in the body of a new species that thrive in the deepest ocean trench.

A world contaminated by microplastics

In an interview with Newsweek,  the couples  Steve and Deonie  Allen says that this finding may account for the "missing" plastics that enter the ocean.  An estimated 12 million tonnes of plastics get into the sea every year, but except for the plastics found in whales and other sea creatures, scientists are unable to account where most of the plastics go.

The study implies that the ocean is not sequestering microplastics, after all, as previously assumed by the scientists.  The sea is actually releasing microplastics in the atmosphere and spreading it around the globe.

Earth scientist from the University of Manchester Ian Kane, who is studying the transport of microplastics in deep-sea currents, said that with this finding, microplastics might be sequestered in the soil or vegetation and maybe "locked up indefinitely."

Consequently, the vegetables may be laced with microplastics that once found its way to the sea, got ejected by the sea waves into the air from the bubbles, and then found its way back into the land.