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Atmospheric contribution of nanoplastics to North Atlantic Ocean
Summary
Scientists found that tiny plastic particles called nanoplastics are being carried through the air from land areas and falling into the North Atlantic Ocean. These microscopic plastic pieces come from common materials like water bottles, food packaging, and shopping bags, and they're now contaminating even remote ocean areas far from where the plastic waste originally came from. This matters because nanoplastics can enter the food chain through sea life and potentially affect human health when we eat seafood or drink water.
Nanoplastics (d ≤ 1 µm) are now recognized as ubiquitous contaminants throughout the Earth system. However, the mechanisms governing their transport and exchange between environmental compartments remain poorly constrained. Although elevated concentrations of nanoplastics have been reported in the North Atlantic Ocean, their dominant sources and transport pathways still require clarification. Marine nanoplastics may originate from the fragmentation and physicochemical degradation of larger plastic debris entering the ocean, but atmospheric transport and dry deposition represent an additional, potentially important pathway supplying nanoplastics to remote oceanic regions. In this study, thermal desorption proton-transfer-reaction mass spectrometry (TD-PTR-MS), coupled with multicomponent multivariate standard addition (MMSA), was applied to quantify nanoplastics collected on aerosol filters during a research expedition across the North Atlantic Ocean from Vigo, Spain, to the Bahamas in November–December 2023. Nanoplastics from five major polymer classes—polystyrene (PS), polyethylene (PE), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polypropylene (PP), and polyethylene terephthalate (PET)—were detected in all air samples. The results reveal substantially higher nanoplastic concentrations in air masses influenced by continental sources, with a pronounced decrease over the mid-Atlantic region. Concentrations ranged from 2.01 to 11.69 ng m⁻³ for PS, 7.12 to 59.71 ng m⁻³ for PVC, 9.94 to 50.91 ng m⁻³ for PE, 6.99 to 44.77 ng m⁻³ for PP, and 10.54 to 35.31 ng m⁻³ for PET.These findings demonstrate that atmospheric transport plays a central role in controlling the distribution of nanoplastics over the North Atlantic and constitutes a major pathway linking terrestrial plastic emissions to the remote ocean.