We’ve long known about floating bottles, drifting fishing nets, and even microplastics. But a new study has uncovered something far more pervasive and troubling: nanoplastics—particles smaller than a thousandth of a millimetre—now dominate the plastic pollution in the Atlantic Ocean.
This research, published in Nature, changes how we think about ocean plastics and what it will take to address them.
Billions of Particles, Everywhere
The research team, aboard the research vessel RV Pelagia, measured nanoplastics from the European continental shelf to the middle of the Atlantic subtropical gyre. They found:
- 1.5–32 mg of nanoplastics per cubic metre throughout the water column.
- Concentrations were highest near Europe’s coasts, but even in the middle of the Atlantic, nanoplastics were everywhere.
- The mixed layer alone may hold 27 million tonnes of nanoplastics, more than the estimated mass of larger plastic fragments across the entire Atlantic.
These particles are not just floating at the surface—they were detected from the sunlit upper layers all the way down to the deep-sea bottom.
Why This Matters
Unlike larger pieces of plastic, nanoplastics are so small they behave more like chemicals than debris:
- They travel vast distances, mixing throughout the ocean rather than clustering in surface gyres.
- They can pass through biological barriers, meaning marine organisms may absorb them more easily.
- They may even interfere with ecosystems and ocean chemistry, though their exact effects are still being studied.
This means the ocean plastic problem isn’t just about what we can see—it’s mostly what we can’t.
Where They Come From
The study points to several sources:
- Fragmentation: Sunlight and wave action break larger plastics into nanoplastics.
- Atmospheric fallout: Tiny plastic particles can travel in the air and deposit onto the ocean surface.
- Coastal runoff: Rivers and urban waterways wash plastics straight into the sea.
Interestingly, polyethylene and polypropylene—two of the most common plastics—were hard to detect at this scale. The researchers suspect these plastics may chemically transform in seawater, making them invisible to current detection techniques.
What Needs to Happen Next
This discovery fundamentally reshapes the fight against plastic pollution. Cleanup strategies targeting visible debris, like nets and booms, can’t touch this invisible tide. Instead, the study calls for:
- Global plastic reduction at the source, especially in packaging.
- New monitoring technologies for nanoplastics.
- Stronger international governance, because nanoplastics don’t respect borders.
As lead author Dušan Materić notes, “If we only measure what we can see, we are missing the biggest part of the problem.”
A New Era of Ocean Pollution
This research suggests we may have underestimated the ocean plastic crisis by an order of magnitude. Nanoplastics are now the dominant form of marine plastic pollution—too small to collect, too widespread to ignore, and potentially too dangerous to leave unstudied.
Plastic pollution is no longer just an eyesore. It’s an invisible planetary-scale contaminant.
Nanoplastic concentrations across the North Atlantic, Nature, 2025-07-09
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