Water Pollution

A flask of orange dye, a spoonful of plastic powder, water, and a stirrer turning in the dark. After 10 days the orange was nearly gone. Nothing in that flask was supposed to be able to do that: the…

Six common plastics are not chemically inert once they sit in water as small particles, chemists at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley report. In a paper published Oct.…

Researchers in Germany have released an open-source tool that estimates how much microplastic lies buried in estuary sediment at places nobody has sampled. The tool, called NIXVEGS, predicts particle…

Plastic shows up in Arctic snow, Arctic air, Arctic seawater and Arctic fish, and the explanation usually offered is distance. Particles ride winds and currents north from the places where plastic is…

Researchers at Nankai University paired three carbon additives with three industrial pollutants in bench-scale bioreactors run under an applied electric current, and pollutant removal differed by up…

Jay R. Rooker of Texas A&M University and colleagues have measured plastic particles in the muscle of dolphinfish and yellowfin tuna caught across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Muscle is…

Every day, we encounter the electrostatic properties of plastics, often without giving them much thought. Synthetic fabrics cling to one another, dust is readily drawn to plastic surfaces, and in…

In March 2024, the German research vessel Maria S. Merian held station over deep water south of Gran Canaria and began lowering sample bottles. The deepest one closed at 2,720 meters, in water that…

Nutrient pollution leaves more of the carbon buried in lake beds unprotected and easier to break down, according to a study published Oct. 2 in Communications Earth & Environment. Lake sediments hold…

Thawing ground in northwest Arctic Alaska is releasing acid and dissolved metals into the rivers that drain it, and the chemical signal carries far downstream, according to a survey of six watersheds…

Wash a fleece jacket and a little of it leaves with the water. The plastic threads that come off are too small to notice, and they head down a drain, through a treatment plant and eventually out to…

A bubble barrier is a simple piece of equipment. Air is pushed into the water at the bottom of a channel and rises as a wall of bubbles, and plastic drifting down with the current is meant to be…