Where are Microplastics?

Microplastics are found everywhere - this is no exaggeration. For almost twenty years researchers have been trying to identify the prevalence of microplastics, and if there even is such existence. However, in 2004, UK marine ecologist, Richard Thompson, coined the term microplastics and confirmed its existence after his research team discovered the materials on British beaches. To this day we are still trying to find and identify microplastics in our environment - this is one of the focal points of my own experiment in Lake Norman and the Catawba River, NC.

Microplastic pollution is not limited to the marine environment, in fact terrestrial locations, such as shorelines, sediments, soils, forests, urban areas, etc. Eventually these can travel from the terrestrial environment to marine environments via runoff, contamination of groundwater or through natural processes such as wind or rainfall and storms which send terrestrial microplastics to our waterways.

In relation to marine environments, microplastics are widely dispersed in our global waters. Our water columns, fresh and salt water systems, open oceans, and even treated wastewater, all have been identified to contain traces of microplastic pollution. Marine and environmental researchers continue to search various locales, utilizing the help of citizen scientists, to record the persaveiness of microplastic pollution.

These are just some of the locations where current research has found evidence of microplastics:

• The Great Lakes

• The North Pacific Central Gyre

• The Pacific Gyre

• North and South Pacific subtropical Gyres

• Coastal Australia

• Bay of Bengal

• The Mediterranean Sea

• The Arctic Ocean

• Antarctic Waters

Air, table salt, sugar, biota, food, toothpaste, even baby bottles, and the water we drink, these all contain some form of microplastics. We cannot run from this anymore. The question that remains now is, what can we do about this?

Sources

• “Microplastics in Terrestrial Ecosystems: A Scientometric Analysis”

• https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/science/microplastics?utm_source=sciam&utm_campaign=sciam

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666016420300086