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Microplastics flushed by floods
Summary
This news article reported on a Manchester, England study finding that flooding dramatically increases the transport of microplastics from river sediments into the sea, with the largest river survey of freshwater microplastics at the time showing particles at all 40 sampling sites. The study demonstrated that rivers act as major conduits for microplastics and that extreme flooding events intensify these inputs.
Microplastic pollutants may be far more pervasive in lakes, streams, and oceans than previously estimated, according to the results of the largest survey yet of the particles in a freshwater system. The survey, conducted in the Manchester, England area, also showed that extreme flooding can flush large quantities of the particles from rivers and into the sea (Nat. Geosci. 2018, DOI: 10.1038/s41561-018-0080-1). Since the early 2000s, environmental scientists have studied the potential environmental effects of plastic microfibers, beads, and other fragments in the oceans. “There’s hardly any data at all on microplastics in river systems,” says Jamie Woodward, a physical geographer at the University of Manchester. In the spring and summer of 2015, Woodward and colleagues, Rachel Hurley and James Rothwell, collected sediment samples from 40 sites along all ten of the rivers in the northwest of England that drain into the Irish Sea. Back in the lab, the researchers