Looking Skyward For Microplastics

Microplastics are a hot topic these days. Spawned by everything from plastic bags to laundered clothing, the volume of tiny particles that pollute our oceans has exploded in recent years.

What you probably didn’t know, until now, is that about 1,100 tons of the stuff are floating above the Western U.S. alone, according to new modeling published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) and written about by Matt Simon for Wired. Another big surprise: Much of it isn’t coming from the big urban areas.