Microplastics, which scientists worry could impact an individual’s health through ingestion, have now been linked to the ability to change global weather patterns.
PennState scientists, in the United States, have found microplastics could act as ice nucleating particles, microscopic aerosols that facilitated the formation of ice crystals in clouds.
Professor Miriam Freedman said this meant microplastics could influence rain patterns, weather forecasting, climate modelling and even aviation safety by influencing how atmospheric ice crystals formed clouds.
“Throughout the past two decades of research into microplastics, scientists have been finding that they’re everywhere, so this is another piece of that puzzle,” Professor Freedman said.
“It’s now clear that we need to have a better understanding of how they’re interacting with our climate system, because we’ve been able to show that the process of cloud formation can be triggered by microplastics.”
She said in a polluted environment with many more aerosol particles, like microplastics, the available water is distributed among many more of those particles, forming smaller droplets around each of them.
“When you have more droplets, you get less rain, but because droplets only rain once they get large enough, you collect more total water in the cloud before the droplets are large enough to fall and, as a result, you get heavier rainfall when it comes.”
Access the full study: Pristine and Aged Microplastics Can Nucleate Ice through Immersion Freezing.
