Microplastics Are Present In Clouds, Confirm Japanese Scientists

alphacyberranger@sh.itjust.works to World News@lemmy.world – 431 points –
Microplastics Are Present In Clouds, Confirm Japanese Scientists
ndtv.com
29

Okay, we get it. The Earth is made of microplastics now. It's time to just accept we live on an Earth made of plastic and all become Barbie Girls to make it fantastic.

And everyone can also brush our hair and undress us everywhere

This news makes me blue, dabadedabadie.

Raindrops can't form without larger particles like dust. I shudder to think how microplastics are replacing these particles

I don't get what the big deal is. I'm full of microplastics, but microplastics are made of dinosaurs, so that makes me part dinosaur and that's badass.

but microplastics are made of dinosaurs

Algae actually.

What makes it vegan, I guess.

"Each liter of cloud water contained between 6.7 to 13.9 pieces of the plastics."

Anyone know what a "piece" is?

Probably a piece of microplastic. Not trying to be facetious. Microplastic already refers to a size of a piece of plastic as opposed to the material in general. Sort of like how gold is a material and a gold nugget is a piece of gold. As for how big this is what Wikipedia says the NOAA says.

Microplastics are fragments of any type of plastic less than 5 mm (0.20 in) in length, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)[1][2] and the European Chemicals Agency.[3] They cause pollution by entering natural ecosystems from a variety of sources, including cosmetics, clothing, food packaging, and industrial processes.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics

If you read below the fold in the article you get:

The team identified nine different types of polymers and one type of rubber in the airborne microplastics -- ranging in size from 7.1 to 94.6 micrometers.

So would that mean it is assumed that microplastics are spherical and the length refers to the diameter? So that we could calculate percent concentration by using the volumes.