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2024-05-24 12:30:56

Bread and Circuses on Nostr: Capitalism’s mania to promote a nonstop hyperactive consumer culture is literally ...

Capitalism’s mania to promote a nonstop hyperactive consumer culture is literally making us sick. All that needless plastic packaging and the cheap plastic products they sell to us soon end up as trash — and eventually as microplastics.

These poisonous remnants of billionaire greed are now in the food we eat and in the water we drink. They’re in our bloodstreams, in our brains, and even in women’s placentas.

But that’s not all. Microplastics are *also* making climate change worse.
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It turns out plastics in the ocean do more than suffocate turtles, fish, and other marine life. A new study co-authored by Northeastern researcher Aron Stubbins shows that microplastics may reduce the ability of the ocean to offset the climate crisis by slowing down the rate at which carbon is taken from the sea surface to the depths.

For millennia, the ocean has been part of a carbon sink process in which dead phytoplankton clump together and fall into the deep ocean in showers of what look like "marine snow," says Stubbins, a professor of marine and environmental science.

But research shows that microplastics in the ocean are slowing the process down by making the "marine snow" more buoyant, Stubbins says.

"Plastics want to float. If phytoplanktons grow on microplastics instead of as free living organisms, that changes the buoyancy of the phytoplankton when they die," Stubbins says.

"Basically, the plastics are slowing down the sinking rate of the marine snow, which is potentially reducing the efficiency with which the ocean can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere," he says.
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FULL ARTICLE -- https://phys.org/news/2024-05-microplastics-carbon-sea-surface-depths.html

#Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis
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