NEWS
EARTH & ENVIRONMENT
Tiny microplastics
fly far on the wind
Airborne plastic bits can land
more than 95 kilometers away
BY CAROLYN GRAMLING
Plastic pollution from Paris doesn’t nec-
essarily stay in Paris.
Tiny bits of plastic that originated in
cities were carried by wind to a remote
mountain location over 95 kilometers
away, a study finds. It’s the first demon-
stration that microplastics, ranging from
a few nanometers to 5 millimeters in size,
can travel far through the atmosphere.
Even more startling is how much
microplastic fell from the sky in such a
remote location, the researchers say. The
rain of microplastics in some far-flung
places may rival that of some large cities.
EARTH & ENVIRONMENT
Lab study reveals volcanic secret
Pyroclastic flows’ dual layers explain long-distance travel ability
BY MARIA TEMMING
Dumping tons of volcanic material down
a lab flume may finally have revealed
how searing mixtures of hot gas and rock
travel so far from volcanic eruptions.
These pyroclastic flows can travel tens
to hundreds of kilometers over rough ter-
rain and even uphill (SN: 7/7/18, p. 32).
Despite being made of gritty volcanic
rock, “they seem to have as much friction
Simulating avalanches of volcanic material
called pyroclastic flows in the lab shows how
these currents cover so much ground.
12 SCIENCE NEWS | May 11, 2019 & May 25, 2019
“We found them somewhere they
shouldn’t be,” says atmospheric and
environmental scientist Deonie Allen
of EcoLab in Castanet-Tolosan, France.
Allen and colleagues set up two types
of atmospheric deposition collectors at
the Bernadouze meteorological station,
in the Pyrenees Mountains between
France and Spain. About 365 micro­plastic
particles per square meter per day, on
average, were deposited at the site, the
team reports online April 15 in Nature
G­eoscience. That’s a rate that “is similar
to what’s happening in Paris,” Allen says.
But the size and relative composition
of the plastics differed from those found
in previous studies in Paris or Dongguan,
China. The dominant particles in those
cities were slender fibers larger than
about 100 micrometers and composed
of polypropylene or polyethylene tere-
phthalate, called PET. Such fibers often
originate in clothing or other textiles.
with the ground as if they were made of
water,” says Alain Burgisser, a geologist
at the University Savoie Mont Blanc in
France. The driving force behind these
flows “has always been a mystery.”
Now, lab experiments and computer
simulations suggest that in pyroclastic
flows, a dense layer of material glides
across the ground atop a low-friction
layer made largely of air. These find-
At the Pyrenees site, however, most
of the plastic bits were smaller than
25 micrometers and consisted mostly of
polystyrene and polyethylene fragments,
common in many packing materials.
Polystyrene is susceptible to degrada-
tion by weathering or by solar ultraviolet
rays, making worn-down bits more easily
transportable by wind. At the Pyrenees
site, higher wind speeds as well as brief
bursts of intense rain or snow appear to
be linked to higher deposition rates.
A simulation of wind speeds and direc-
tions suggested that the plastics traveled
at least 95 kilometers to reach the site.
But the plastics probably came from far-
ther, Allen says, because no highly popu-
lated industrial cities lie in that region.
“Unfortunately, [the study] confirms
the ubiquitous contamination of our
environment by microplastics,” says
Johnny Gaspéri, an environmental scien-
tist at the Université Paris-Est Créteil. s
ings, reported online April 8 in Nature
Geoscience, may lead to more accurate
forecasts of the speed and spread of
these flows.
Gert Lube, a volcanologist at Massey
University in Palmerston North, New
Zealand, and colleagues created mini
pyroclastic flows by piling volcanic
material into a giant hopper and heat-
ing the rock up to 130° Celsius. When
the researchers dumped the hot volca-
nic material down a 12-meter chute, a
dilute layer emerged at the bottom of the
flow, topped with a layer of more densely
packed volcanic matter. This sparse
underlying layer develops because, near
the bottom of the flow, material right next
to the ground moves much more slowly
than the material slightly above.
ANDERSEN_OYSTEIN/ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES PLUS
This difference in flow rate creates
low air pressure close to the ground, so
gas from higher-pressure areas migrates
downward, creating an air-rich base
layer. Particles in the top of the flow glide
along this airy cushion like disks on an air
hockey table and so travel long distances.
Computer simulations indicated that
this friction-defying phenomenon occurs
in life-size pyroclastic flows, too. s
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