A study sampling microplastics across the state is discovering where they are the most concentrated, with some clues as to why.
Discovering microplastics in Alaska, from the highest mountain to pristine waterways across the stateA screenshot from a May 16 satellite text message from UAF student Matthew Crisafi-Lurtsema, who with fellow student Roger Jaramillo is collecting snow samples from Denali. He sent the message from his tent at about 10,500 feet on the 20,310-foot mountain.
That includes lower elevations in Alaska, where a group of scientists from UAF’s Water and Environmental Research Center in 2020 and 2021 sampled snow and freshwater from more than 70 locations on a south-to-north transect, mostly along highways. Their recently published study showed plastic fragments everywhere they sampled, from the Kenai Peninsula to the North Slope.
An artist’s representation of the major sources of microplastics to the atmosphere and their relative contributions to deposition over the western United States . From the paper Constraining the atmospheric limb of the plastic cycle, in the journal PNAS, April 12, 2021. They found the snowpack of Alaska north of the Brooks Range had high concentrations of tiny plastic particles. This was probably due to winds and large-scale weather patterns carrying plastics from far away. Researchers many years ago found pollutants from smelters and other Russian sources migrating to Alaska in what they called Arctic Haze.
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