Posted on 02/23/2024 7:48:11 PM PST by Alas Babylon!
Microplastics! They're in everything, from our bodies to the ocean.
And apparently they're even found in sediment layers that date back as early as the first half of the 1700s, showing microplastics' pernicious ability to infiltrate even environments untouched by modern humans.
A team of European researchers made this alarming discovery after studying the sediment layers at three lakes in Latvia, as detailed in a study published in the journal Science Advances.
Scientists have long used layers of ash or ice to study past events on Earth, leading to the question of whether microplastics can serve as a reliable chronological marker for the Anthropocene.
Clearly not, according to this new research, which found microplastics in every layer of sediment they dredged up, including one from 1733.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Maybe a microplastic isn't some new man-made chemical compound, but can include polymers and compounds that are made naturally? Plants, geological processes, etc?
There are reader comments available. Here’s one:
I would like to know the chemical composition and molecular weights of these “microplastics”. The term “plastic” covers a very wide range of polymers. There are many polymers produced by plants, animals, and geologic processes besides the “plastics” that we produce and use everyday.
Here’s another:
Have environmental companies, that are paid to “find” microplastic pollution, been misidentifying and misrepresenting their findings for profit? Trust goes both ways. And where money and profit are at stake, how can we trust the results? Trust, but verify?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer
Natural polymeric materials such as hemp, shellac, amber, wool, silk, and natural rubber have been used for centuries. A variety of other natural polymers exist, such as cellulose, which is the main constituent of wood and paper.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the Earth plus plastic. The Earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the Earth. The Earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the Earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?
Plastic… a-hole.
-George Carlin
“Microplastics Found in Sediment Layers Untouched by Modern Humans”
So Neanderthals were into plastics? Really?
Yup. And people have long burned waste for energy.
The burning of coal and peat produces polymers in the smoke...............
We’re probably made from the stuff
Which, due to lightning and volcanoes/lava fissures, sent such smoke out over the vast long years of Earth’s history—long before man.
Perhaps coal and peat didn’t burn on a scale such as modern times, but things like the Siberian traps were burning a prodigious amount of something 250 million years ago!
"What? Pfft. Naw!"
“Maybe a microplastic isn’t some new man-made chemical compound, but can include polymers and compounds that are made naturally? Plants, geological processes, etc?”
A good possibility. Plastic is made from oil after all, AND there is now plastics made from plants.
Aliens?
Who’d a think it?
Or if they are new and can penetrate the sediment layers, what other things have penetrated the sentiment layers. How much has been misinterpreted because do to things infiltrating the layers?
And if things can leach into layers, then other things can probably leach out of layers.
Only solution is a new tax on plastic /s
In one of the old NatLamp "True Facts" issues, an article about a dig in, hmm, I think Iceland, was reprinted -- what appeared to be some kind of doll or idol was cleaned a bit and found to be a Stretch Armstrong. That's an example of corrupted stratification.
Microplastics are so bad, they can time-travel
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