Microplastics Might Be In Clouds, Too

Is there a place on Earth where you can’t find microplastics? Scientists have found them in everything from Arctic algae to human testicles; given that we do not regularly chow down on literal pieces of plastic, this is not thought of as an especially promising development. (The film Crimes of the Future, in which some humans evolve to eat plastic, remains in the realm of science fiction.) And if a new report is to be believed, we can add another remote location to places where microplastics can be found: in the clouds that hover above the planet’s surface.

That, at least, is one of the points made by research from Miriam Freedman and Heidi Busse that was recently published at Live Science. Freedman and Busse had a simple goal with their research: to see if “microplastic fragments could serve as nuclei for water droplets” — akin to the ways in which water droplets condense around other particles when forming clouds.

Freedman and Busse used four types of microplastics to see if they could form the nuclei for water droplets in mid-air — and to see if the droplets could subsequently freeze. They found that, as they put it, “50% of the droplets were frozen by the time they cooled to minus 8 F (minus 22 C).” The authors also noted that factors such as ultraviolet radiation and ozone had the ability to affect the freezing process.

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The scientists also pointed to another recent study that found that microplastics in the atmosphere had similar properties. There’s still a lot more work to be done here; Freedman and Busse mention that one step involves determining “[microplastics’] concentrations at the altitudes where clouds form.” But if microplastics are a growing factor in the creation of clouds, it could make for a better understanding of weather around the world.