Microplastics in clouds may be contributing to climate change, research suggests
News article :https://news.sky.com/story/microplastics-in-clouds-may-be-contributing-to-climate-change-research-suggests-12971517
Scientific paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-023-01626-x
Sky news reports in the article that the study was done by collecting water samples at altitudes 1,300-3,776m. This was done in Japan by Mount Fuji and Mount Oyama. It then goes on to discuss that imaging techniques were used to find 9 types of polymers and one type of rubber were found with most of them being hydrophilic. These were at 6.7-13.9 pieces per liter concentrations and the pieces were 7.1-94.6 micrometers. These plastics could be effective cloud condensation nuclei.
The remainder of the article focuses on quotes from the study, the author and the press release. It simply says that plastics affect climate. There is then discussion of how this one of the first instances of finding tropospheric microplastics and then rising in the atmosphere leading to UV exposure and the release of additional greenhouse gasses. There is then greater context provided about the prevalence of microplastics in the oceans and our bodies. Also how it being in clouds leads to plastic rain and more universal microplastic contamination.
The data found in the article is the core of the paper and what is conveyed in the abstract. The paper initially provides more details about the collection process and also the specifics of the plastic found. Ionic chromatography was used to analyze the cloud water and used FTIR for detection and identification of the polymers which were polyethylene, polypropylene, polyethylene terephthalate, polymethyl methacrylate, polyamide 6, polycarbonate, ethylene–propylene copolymer or polyethylene–polypropylene alloy, polyurethane, epoxy resin. It also discusses how it has been previously reported that plastic is typically hydrophobic, but UV exposure makes them hydrophilic and that degradation was seen in this data and analyzed through shifts in the carbonyl stretch in IR particularly in polypropylene with 5 in 14 pieces being degraded.
The variation of the plastics found by elevation and by mountain is given more depth in the paper noting that Mt Oyama had more polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate while Mt. Fuji was dominated by polycarbonate. It does mention that due to the instruments used it could all be under estimations and different collectors were used at each mountain leading to further variation. They identified that most of the plastics came from the ocean with some from air mass transport from cities by tracking airmass currents in the surrounding mountains.
Figures one: Breakdown of the polymers found by location and elevation.
I would rate this a 8/10. The sky news article does an excellent job reporting what is covered in the abstract of the paper. The data is very well reported and it meaningfully gives context on microplastics to help people understand the implications of the research. There were similar simplifications in the references to characterization techniques and narrowing down to the most important data. The fundamental issue is that climate change and climate impacts from cloud seeding are only mentioned in the abstract of the paper and no further analysis is given. The news article through interviews with the author gives more meaningful information on climate impacts of these plastics than the paper which is mostly intent on analyzing the specific plastics that are present and how those affect cloud condensation. The news article did a reasonable job talking to the author to get more details about the climate impacts that don’t appear in the paper making the impacts even more clear.
I agree that the news report did a solid job at conveying the general findings of the paper and making the impacts of the study understandable. I also found the snippets from the interview with the head researcher very important as they helped underscore the gravity of the findings and relate it back to climate change. This did a good job bridging the gap between scientific jargon and simple terms that define the problem at hand.
ReplyDeleteI believe that the article was relatively simple when it came to explaining how the data was acquired. There was no mention in the news article about the attenuated total reflection imaging or the micro-Fourier transform Infared spectroscopy which the scientists used to actually make these conclusions. While I understand that this is done to cater to the general public that benefits more from the conclusions than the scientific details, I do believe this must be at least mentioned to understand where these data points are coming from.
The spectroscopy stuff through me off too. Referring to it generally just as advanced imaging seemed like a gross oversimplification. I agree that the interview stuff from the professor was so important for understanding the climate impacts
DeleteThis study was very interesting to read, good choice! I agree with you that the author of the sky news article almost exclusively used information from the abstract in the article. I felt that the information that was shared in the article was very surface level and did not dive deeper into the causes and effects of having microplastics in the air. I thought the author of the article did a good job of getting across that there are microplastics in our atmosphere and they might have an effect on climate in the future. Even though I feel the general public has a sense for what microplastics are, I wish the article talked a little more about what microplastics are, where have they been observed, why this study is important and its major findings (specifically the 9 microplastics observed), and what can be done as a society to mitigate the presence of microplastics in the atmosphere.
ReplyDeleteIt was especially notable to me that the article didn't even report what the 9 microplastics were. I think that an increased contextualization of just the huge number of places microplastics have been found would be helpful.
DeleteI thought this was an interesting topic and I was surprised that this was the first study on microplastics in clouds. I was also surprised that the methods of collecting cloud water were not the same at each site and it seems like this would have had a big impact on the findings. Regardless of the exact concentrations, the article did a good job of laying out the information. Discussing the impact of microplastics on marine life really emphasized the importance of controlling this issue and the long-term consequences of ignoring it.
ReplyDeleteI thought that the news article could have done a better job of explaining exactly how plastics are involved in climate change/why they are so bad for the environment. I think overall they did a good job of summarizing the key points of the research but when they said that microplastics are "contaminating everything we eat and drink" I felt like there should have been more of a discussion/explanation.
I was also surprised that they used different sampling techniques at each location and would be really curious to see how the results shifted with more even instrumentation. I agree that it would have been nice if there was a better explanation of the climate change impact, but that information just isn't available in the paper.
DeleteI agree that the article is well written but I do wish the implications of microplastics in these regions was discussed more. I understand that the news article was working off what the paper was giving them about implications (as they are not scientists themselves), but because the news work is what goes to the public eye I feel like it should be looked into a bit more. For people who do not study environmental chemistry (like us :) ) the fact that MPs could be in the air and may have an effect on climate change means very little. I feel like the news article did not cover the context of the research well enough for a general public view. That being said, the research is one determining if MPs are in those suspected regions and characterizing them. I would love to look more into papers discussing the implications on the climate and WHY microplastics can affect it - seems like an incredibly cool new discussion!
ReplyDeleteI agree that getting to know the impacts better would be much appreciated. It's interesting how the article actually gives more details on this by touching on the health impacts of microplastics than the paper itself does. I think the big take away is this paper is extremely preliminary and hopefully it will be built upon in the next few years
DeleteI tend to agree with your rating of the article, as it did a good job describing and reporting the important points in the paper. I do think that the article is a bit short and could use some more points from the paper but as you've stated, the article did a satisfactory job gaining information from the author that didn't appear in the paper. I do think the article could certainly have gone a bit more into detail, especially with regard to understanding microplastics a bit more, as well as the major conclusions from the paper. Nonetheless, the article's context of microplastics and well-reported data are necessary for understanding the research in the paper, so it is a satisfactory article that does a good job outlining the paper's research of microplastics and their effect on climate change.
ReplyDeleteIts always the case with general news that there could be more details. The fascinating part of this to me is the article having more in-depth climate change information than the paper.
DeleteThe scientific article is very interesting! It's shocking how prevalent microplastics are that they are even in clouds/rainfall. I agree with your assessment of the news article's summary of the paper. It hit the major points of the study and explained them in a digestible manner. I find it interesting that the article goes with the climate change angle in the title despite there being minimal information in the initial paper on climate impacts. The paper primarily focused on the fact that microplastics were present in clouds and played a role in cloud formation than diving into the climate effects that it has, although it was nice to see it expanded upon in the interview just a bit with the sentence about greenhouse gas emissions from photodegradation. The article could've made it same points with the journalistic engagement tactic in the title coming from there being literal plastics in the atmosphere. Other than that, the article did a pretty good job at conveying the science. It would have been nice to see a link to the paper in the news article, though!
ReplyDeleteScientists have made a groundbreaking discovery, detecting microplastics in the clouds surrounding Japan's iconic mountains, Mount Fuji and Mount Oyama. These tiny plastic particles, with their water-attracting properties, could serve as crucial agents for cloud formation. The implications are profound, as this phenomenon could ultimately impact our climate. As these airborne microplastics degrade in the upper atmosphere under the influence of intense ultraviolet radiation, they release greenhouse gases, contributing to global warming. Considering the potential influence of airborne microplastics on cloud formation and, by extension, climate change, how can we develop targeted strategies or technologies to mitigate these impacts and safeguard our environment and weather patterns for the future?
ReplyDeleteI remember seeing a post about this on social media a few weeks ago, and I thought it was really interesting especially considering that this has not been detected before. I definitely agree that the included quotes help provide context and inform readers, and I also appreciate that the article is pretty concise and seemed to really emphasize the main ideas of the study and why it is important. Although I also agree that they could have included more information about the the study, I also understand why the authors might have decided not to discuss it much, as it might be too much detail for the general public.
ReplyDeleteHi Katherine. I think that this news article is both fascinating and quite alarming on both a global warming and human wellness scale. The article did a good job at concisely summarizing the paper, as you said, and connecting the data to a wider view of impacts and answering the question of why we should care. I agree with your rating of 8/10. It focuses more on the impacts of the results, rather than how they were obtained. To that end, if the article attempted to unpack the exact data and specifics from the paper I think it would dilute the message and make the information less palatable for an audience without a scientific background.
ReplyDeleteThis paper is really interesting! At first, I was a bit surprised that microplastic particles that big (with diameters of several micrometers) could reach heights of a few thousand km altitude. However, after thinking more deeply, I realized that this is still relatively not very high and is well within the troposphere and also that other aerosol particles much larger than these can climb still higher in the atmosphere (volcanic ash for example). I think the increased UV exposure leading to increased hydrophilicity is interesting as well. Do you know if the hygroscopicity increase is due to UV photolyzing the plastic molecules themselves, allowing O2 and other molecules to react with the hypothetically-photolyzed plastic? Or is it that increased UV exposure leads to greater concentrations of surrounding OH radicals that can abstract H's from the microplastic, allowing O2 to add and different polar functional groups to be added, increasing hydrophilicity? I like that the researchers used passive sampling via inert strings to collect cloud water at the summit of these mountains. It sounds like a fun adventure to climb a mountain and collect pieces of clouds, but I also like it because I learned about passive sampling via inert strings this semester and have developed an appreciation for their simplicity and usefulness.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting article! I thought this article did a nice job making the scientific findings very easy to understand for the broad audience. I thought the papers findings were fascinating. I think the article did a nice job explains the cloud condensation nuclei. Additionally, I liked the how the article extended to the broader scale of the impact go microplastics at the end. Not only are they potentially changing the climate due to seeding of clouds, but they are also in use and everywhere around us. I do wish however the article expanded upon the effects photodegradation of these aerosol microplastics on greenhouse gas emissions. It was only briefly mentioned in the article. However, overall, I would agree with the 8/10 score.
ReplyDeleteHi Katherine, really liked your choice with the article and paper, and thanks for including an image with the detected microplastics on each mountain! When looking at that figure, I notice Mt. Oyama has a roughly 30% total composition of polyurethane, but Mt. Fuji doesn't have any at all. Looking at Japan geographically, the mountains are not very far from one another and similarly downwind from the same conglomerate of cities (wind coming from the northwest). I didn't see anything from my reading of the article, so would you happen to have any ideas about why polyurethane was only exclusive to Mt. Oyama?
ReplyDeleteI find it interesting that plastic can make it that high up in the atmosphere. In addition, I am surprised that the plastic contents of the air changed depending upon where the wind was coming from. It's also fascinating that this was the first time people have reported on this (according to the authors), so I'm wondering if these microplastics were harder to detect until now or they weren't considered that impactful to the climate before.
ReplyDeleteI also found the article itself to be very informative and great for general audiences to get the facts without feeling lost.