Ooooh,
hello dear English speaking-reading-hearing listener, welcome back to
me, @sciencemug, the blog/podcast/twitter&instagram
accounts/entity behind the unsuccessful e-shop stuffngo on zazzle.com
which tells you science stories while air-guitar playing heavy-metal
songs but instead of air is using helium so every gesture is high
pitched and funny and the metal is lighter, aaand which talks to you
thanks to the voice, kidnapped via a voodoo-wireless trick, from a
veeery very very dumb human.
Aaand
which does all of this in Eng?ish, a language that is
to proper English what a complete lack of logic is to something you
can easily distill from the just mentioned helium-guitar playing
thing.
Today I’m gonna tell you a story ‘bout
pollution on high.
Listen to the podcast episode on
Sooo, dear listener, you probably already heard that the top of the world, Mount Everest, if full of crap by now. Meaning not that it has become an unbearable arrogant mount full of itself always bragging for being the tallest of them all (at least above sea level), nope, meaning that, given the massive amount of people that climb it every year (since 1953), well, it is now full of human garbage.
Aaand, dear listener, you probably also
already heard that space, around our planet, is by now full of
garbage too. There’s in fact a lot of space junk orbiting our
world: old satellites, pieces of rockets, debris of various sizes and
nature, in conclusion objects
in the millions
that are a constant real serious threat for whoever and whatever is
or is going to orbit Earth nowadays.
But the pollution on high I am going
to tell you about today, dear listener, is none of the above.
And it is not even the pollution people
that are high produce when smoking dope or other garbage
of the kind...
No, dear listener, I am going to talk of a kind of pollution you find in the sky, in the atmosphere, but that you wouldn’t expect at all, of all the pollutants you can think of, to find up there.
And above all, to find in the rain that
comes down from up there…
You wanna know what this pollutant is?
Eeeh, let’s start from the beginning
then.
The US.
Geological Survey,
the
United States “sole
science agency for the Department of the Interior”,
publishes
a report
(R)
which I’ll call ReportX, since I’m not telling you its actual
title as it would be a major give away about the mysterious
atmospheric/rain pollutant this whole episode/post is about, and I
want to keep the suspense going as long as possible.
"ReportX about rain pollution": free pic by John-Mark Smith on Pexels; Adapted by @sciencemug |
Anyway, ReportX is written by Gregory Wetherbee, an expert of
Environmental Science, Austin Baldwin, an hydrologist [that is a dude
who studies “how water moves across and through the Earth’s crust”
(source: Boureau
of Labor and Statistics)],
and Professor James Ranville, a chemist and geochemist of the
Colorado
School of Mines.
We’ll call ‘em the ReportX Guys (aaaah such a clever and witty
blog/podcast I am!).
The ReportX Guys
are involved with the
“National
Atmospheric Deposition Program/National Trends Network (NADP/NTN)”
(R)
where the NTN “is the only network providing a long-term record of precipitation chemistry across the United States” (source NADP).
More specifically this
organization collects
precipitation samples
of the previous week's precipitation (rain, snow, sleet) from across
the US, then passes them to the “Central Analytical Laboratory
(CAL) at the Wisconsin State State Laboratory of Hygiene (WSLH)”
(source NADP)
where the samples are analyzed to check, among other things, their
pH, and their calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, sulfate,
nitrate, chloride, and ammonium presence.
Moreover, the National Trends Network
(the NTN) has a bunch of other sub-networks which analyze
respectively concentrations and depositions of mercury (MDN,
AMNet)
and ammonia (AmoN).
Another
sub-network of the NTN is the one of our three researchers, the
“Network
for Urban Atmospheric Nitrogen Chemistry (NUANC)”
(R),
which collects “[a]tmospheric wet deposition
samples” (R)
(as above stated rain, snow, sleet) from a study area in Colorado,
US. This study area counts 8 spots: 6 in the Denver-Boulder urban
corridor and 2 in the contiguous Colorado Front Range.
Now, I am a brainless dumb blog/podcast
and geography is not my strong point (my strong point being basically
standing in front of the dark screen of any device I find waiting
for any of the Rorschach Inkblots to spontaneously appear like a
subatomic particle in the quantum foam in order to discuss with it
about the secret humanity’s destruction plan hatched by
super-dimensional utterly evil but unquestionably charming beings
which
incipit -
of this
doomsday plan - has
been the
creation, on planet Earth, of that ghastly abomination that pizza
with pineapples is). So, in short, geography not my thing, hence I
must clarify things here.
Ok, as just said, the study area of our
ReportX Guys includes 6 sites in the Denver-Boulder urban corridor and 2
in the contiguous Colorado Front Range.
Let’s start with the Colorado Front
Range.
Colorado is one of the states of the
United States. It is roughly in the middle of the US, more toward the
west. It has flat lands in the center east, called Great
Plains, and mountains in the center west, called Southern Rocky
Mountains (of course both Grait Plains and Rocky Mountains are not
only in Colorado).
Part
of those Southern Rocky Mountains is the Front Range, a mountain
range that is in the central portion of said Colorado, hence the
Colorado Front Range
Now let’s pass
to the Denver-Boulder urban corridor.
The study area from which our ReportX Guys get the data is (see the
map on the
report (R))
roughly a square with more or less Denver at its right
bottom corner. Denver is the capital of Colorado, and Boulder is
a city about 40 kilometers (25 miles) north west Denver.
So dear listener, in other and extremely
simplified terms, roughly the right half of the
square study area is the urban corridor, while the left half is the
mountainous part. As for the total surface of such study area, well,
it is about (stress on the “about”) 6000 square kilometers (more
or less 2300 square miles),
that is to say, for instance, almost 8 times New York, 5 times Rome,
3 times Tokyo or about 1/3 of Beijing.
Let’s
take stock of the situation, then: three researchers, aka
the ReportX Guys, collect samples of water fallen down from the sky
with the goal to investigate atmospheric nitrogen. And the ReportX Guys get the samples in 8 different places of a specific area of
Colorado, in the USA.
Now,
one of these places, which our rainy researchers call CO98, is a very
remote one, faraway from cities and the urban contest in general; it
is in fact deep inside a National Park (the Rocky Mountain National Park), in a place called Loch Vale, at an elevation of 3159 meters
(10364 feet), namely more or less that of the top of Mount
Etna,
the tallest (and, incidentally, largest) active volcano of Europe.
So,
in conclusion, the atmospheric wet deposition samples collected by
the ReportX Guys at site CO98 are from an extremely secluded area,
pretty above the sea level, and way out all kind of city stuff.
Now,
our three researchers follow the NTN procedures and collect all the 8
sites samples from collection buckets, with the volumes of the
samples ranging from about 1 third of a liter to almost 3 liters (R). The
ReportX Guys then send
the samples to the above mentioned Central Analytical Laboratory where
they are carefully filtered by filters with less than half a
millionth meter pore size, that is about 200
times smaller than the average diameter of a human hair (ref).
Via
such filtration our researchers “obtain
particulates assumed to be washed from the atmosphere (washout). The
filters [are] dried, weighed, and manually analyzed with a binocular
microscope fitted with a digital camera […] [Moreover four]
deionized water rinses of the sampling system [are] analyzed as
blanks.” (R).
So,
dear listener, at this point I ask you, what do you expect to see
when observing under a good microscope a sample of super filtered
water fall down from the sky, and in one case even from the sky above
a secluded site at 3 kilometers of altitude and located deep inside a wide national
park?
The
answer after the commercial break!
Are
you positive about the fact that Alaska is a dog breed, Australia is
in Brazil, and Africa is a country?
Are
you sure that India is a type of music for hipsters, Mount Fuji a brand of menthol e-cigarettes, and that Iceland a new organic
ice cream flavor?
Then try
our 10 hours full immersion “Geography for Aliens” course!
"Geography For Aliens"; free pic by Марьян Блан on Unsplash; Adapted by @sciencemug |
You
won’t learn a single thing 'bout geography, as it is a scam, but you’ll be wildly
ridiculed by aliens from another galaxy who know about your own
planet way more than you (and they pay us a lot for luring you into this just so they can relentlessly make fun of you! These tiny pink
and white little bastards...)!
So,
dear listener, there are super-filtered rain-snow-sleet water samples
under a microscope.
What
did you expect to see? I personally would expect to see, I dunno,
maybe some pieces of rainbow, a lost tribe of tiny pink and white
geography savvy little aliens staging an extra-solar version of ‘Take Shelter’, and maybe, maybe, if in luck, the most elusive entities
of the whole universe, the socks that disappear from the washing
machine.
But,
as already reminded you
before, I am not in possession of any part of a central nervous
system, no brain here, thus everybody else, included drunk ants and
Malaysian trolls which are notoriously dramatically short sighted,
would probably expect to see nothing but water.
Well, dear listener, Mr and Ms “everybody
else” (along with ants and trolls) would be very surprised.
Unpleasantly surprised. And pretty
scared too. As the ReportX Guys probably are, when they put their 3 pairs of eyes
on the microscope.
Because they finally see what their
mysterious X stands for: plastic!
(Well, you’re right dear listener, technically, as the X stood
for the title
of the report, it should be
“It is raining plastic”
(R)
(that is the actual title of the Report indeed), but bear with me,
“ReportItisrainingX Guys” would have been too long a stage name
to be carried around all this time in the post/episode…)
Anyway, yup, dear listener, the three
researchers find plastics “in
more than 90 percent of the samples”,
including those coming from site CO98, which means that probably “wet
deposition of plastic is ubiquitous and not just an urban condition”
(R).
Now I just
quote the report: “plastic
materials [are]
mostly fibers that [are]
only visible with magnification, approximately 20–40 times (X).
Fibers [are]
present in a variety of colors; the most frequently observed color
[is] blue followed by
red>silver>purple>green> yellow>other colors. Plastic
particles such as beads and shards [are]
also observed with magnification. More plastic fibers [are]
observed in samples from urban sites than from remote, mountainous
sites.” (R)
Now you,
dear clever listener, are probably thinking that maybe those plastic
fibers are pieces of the filters used to filter the water samples…
Eeeh nope, buddy, not the case, since, as the researchers state in
the report, “[i]n the
four blank samples [the
four water rinses of the sampling system mentioned before],
there was one small translucent fiber observed that might have been
plastic. Translucent and white materials, which are the colors of the
sampling apparatus,
[have been therefore] disregarded
in the analyses.”
(R)
"It is raining plastic": free pic by michael podger on Unsplash; Adapted by @sciencemug |
Ok, you say, it rains plastic, ugly ugly
puzzling
tragic truth. But at least for sure the plastics found in the samples
of the CO98 site have been brought there by winds and storms from the
urban areas of Colorado… Eeeh
not necessarily, nope, buddy. To investigate that possibility the
researchers use in fact a state of the art model from the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA), the science driven US agency that provides “weather
forecasts, severe storm warnings, and climate monitoring”
(source:
NOAA).
The
model in question is HYSPLIT,
which
“is
a complete system for computing simple air parcel trajectories, as
well as complex transport, dispersion, chemical transformation, and
deposition simulations.”
(source: NOAA).
Our
three rainy researchers use the model “for
24 hours prior to each [CO98] sample collection at 500-, 750-, and
1,000-meter altitudes”
(R)
in order to perform an “air
mass back-trajectory analysis for
[the] site
samples”
(R)
and find that “[u]rban
areas are southeast
[...] of
site CO98, but plastic deposition [is] more positively identified for
westerly storms than easterly storms”
(R). So basically plastics on CO98 are not coming from the Denver-Boulder urban corridor, but from where there are other mountains way before getting to other cities...
Oooook,
dear listener, let’s
recap: three researchers that are studying nitrogen in the
atmosphere, as an unexpected byproduct of their investigation get
something unsettling and horrid: the evidence that it is raining
plastic!
And
not only it is raining plastic from the skies above your
polluted cities, but also from the skies above mountainous sites at
high elevations that are in the middle of national parks and far away
from urbanization.
So
the three researchers write the Report about this ugly truth, and
exhort to create the technology and protocols that allow to get to “a
routine capability to calculate plastic wet-deposition loads”
(R)
and stress on the fact that nobody knows how exactly “these
plastic materials are accumulating and being assimilated in the
environment and biota
[and that nobody knows either] the
potential effects of these materials on biota”
(R)
(biota: plant and animal life) and
therefore also on all of you, dear human being listeners.
‘Cause,
you know, if rain contains plastic, chances are, to say the least,
that
you drink plastic and that you eat plastic. And I
don’t think
you
get healthier for that...
Ooook,
till
next
time pal,
and if you spare some time and feel like doing it, please rate this
podcast, and/or leave a comment on the blog, and/or take a tour on my
stuffngo
(sNg) e-shop
on zazzle.com so
you can
see if there’s something you like!
Ciao!
The Report this post is about (R)
Wetherbee, G.A., Baldwin, A.K., and Ranville, J.F. (2019). It is raining plastic (Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey).
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