09-07-2025
Tons of Invisible Plastic Pieces Lurk in Ocean Water
What do human brains, placentas and dolphin breath have in common? Signs of plastic pollution in the form of tiny particles known as microplastics.
The ocean is also polluted with plastic, and the issue may be even more extensive than previously thought. A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature estimates the volume of nanoplastics, which are even smaller than microplastics and invisible to the naked eye, to be at least 27 million metric tons in North Atlantic seas — more than the weight of all wild land mammals.
'I've analyzed plastic in Swedish lakes, in urban and very remote air, but this was different,' said Dusan Materic, head of a microplastics and nanoplastics research group at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research in Germany and one of the lead authors of the analysis. 'It's a missing part of the plastics story that we are answering here.'
Nanoplastics are microscopic fragments smaller than one micrometer — roughly the size of small bacteria.
'People were concerned about nanoplastics in ocean water, but they didn't have the technology to see what they really looked like,' said Tengfei Luo, an engineering professor at the University of Notre Dame who was not involved in the new study. Last year, Dr. Luo was an author of a separate study in the journal Science Advances that was the first to successfully find nanoplastics in ocean water and show what they looked like.
'We all expected nanoplastics, the surprising part is the amount of it,' said Sophie ten Hietbrink, a doctoral student at Stockholm University in Sweden and a lead author of the study. She spent four weeks on a boat expedition collecting samples of water across nearly 3,500 nautical miles of coastlines and open ocean near Europe, led by Helge Niemann, a professor at Utrecht University and a scientist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research.
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