Although atmospheric transport and
deposition could be an important
pathway of terrestrial pollutants to the ocean, little information
concerning the presence and distribution of these suspended atmospheric
microplastics in marine air is available. We investigated, for the
first time, the occurrence and distribution of suspended atmospheric
microplastics (SAMPs) in the west Pacific Ocean. In this study, the
spatial distribution, morphological appearance, and chemical composition
of suspended atmospheric microplastics were studied through continuous
sampling during a cruise. SAMPs abundance ranged from 0 to 1.37 n/m3, the median of 0.01 n/m3. Fiber, fragment, and
granule SAMPs quantitively constituted 60%, 31%, and 8% of all MPs,
respectively. Interestingly, plastic microbeads with numerical proportion
of 5% were also observed. A high suspended atmospheric microplastics
abundance was found in the coastal area (0.13 ± 0.24 n/m3), while there was less amount detected in the pelagic area
(0.01 ± 0.01 n/m3). The amount of suspended atmospheric
microplastics collected during the daytime (0.45 ± 0.46 n/m3) was twice the amount collected at night (0.22 ± 0.19
n/m3), on average. Our observations provide field-based
evidence that suspended atmospheric microplastics are an important
source of microplastics pollution in the ocean, especially the pollution
caused by textile microfibers.
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