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Toxins Raining from the Sky
Summary
Scientists studying dust in America's most remote wilderness areas, places like the Grand Canyon and Joshua Tree, discovered wind and rain are dumping over 1,000 tons of microplastics into these "untouched" landscapes every year, equal to hundreds of millions of plastic bottles. This matters because it shows plastic pollution has spread everywhere, even places far from cities and factories, and growing research suggests these tiny plastic particles can disrupt our hormones. This research follows in the footsteps of a 1950s scientist who proved leaded gasoline was contaminating remote environments worldwide, a discov
Abstract In the 1950s, geophysicist Clair Patterson was studying radiometric dating to determine the age of the Earth when his samples revealed a harrowing discovery: lead had contaminated the environment much more than anyone had previously thought. Once he finished his project, he embarked on a scientific crusade documenting atmospheric deposition of lead in remote environments across the globe. Patterson and his team traveled from Antarctica to the North Pole, and from 1967 to 1986, Patterson’s team gathered samples from Yosemite’s remote Thompson Canyon consistently demonstrating abnormally high lead concentrations in soil, snow, plants, and animals. Their unimpeachable science helped push Congress to ban leaded gasoline and set a precedent for wilderness toxicology that found a fitting sequel in the 2010s when biogeochemist Janice Brahney set out to study dust and found microplastics had mixed in with her soil samples. She shifted her research focus to documenting the prevalence of plastics in western wilderness areas, collecting samples from remote environments at Grand Canyon, Rocky Mountain, Joshua Tree, Canyonlands, Great Basin, and Bryce Canyon. The results were startling: wind and rain were depositing microplastics at an estimated rate of more than 1,000 tons per year, or the equivalent of 120–300 million plastic bottles raining from the sky. In the context of medical research demonstrating microplastics’ pernicious endocrine disruption effects, Brahney’s findings have taken on added importance continuing Patterson’s legacy of wilderness toxicology, but whether the data triumph in the end remains to be seen.