Photo: Toan Chu//Unsplash
The prominence of plastic pollution and microplastics in our oceans is widely recognized. It’s a phenomenon scientists have been researching exhaustively for years and alerting us to the potential unintended impacts that our reliance on plastics has on the entire food chain. We’re at the end of the line as plastic breaks down into tiny, microscopic bits, and we are inevitably ingesting it all ourselves through various sources.
One aspect of this that hasn’t been studied as heavily as the presence of microplastics in our ocean is the presence of microplastics in lakes.
“I don’t think you could sample anything and not find plastics anymore,” Janine Brahney, a Utah State University biogeochemist, told the Jackson Hole News&Guide. “The rate at which we’re producing this waste is fast outweighing our ability to control it.”
In 2020, Brahney conducted research that found between 1,000 and 4,000 tons of plastic, the equivalent of 100- to 400-million water bottles, in 12 wilderness areas and national parks in the western United States. A new research project by two high school students focused on lakes in Grand Teton National Park has returned some intriguing results: two lakes, Solitude and Two Ocean, confirmed the presence of microplastics while six others in the area did not. Samples from Jackson Lake, Jenny Lake, Taggart Lake, Marion Lake, Amphitheater Lake and Delta Lake came up negative.
Felix Ma, one of the teenage researchers, told the Jackson Hole News&Guide they were surprised by the negative samples.
The pair came to Wyoming for their research after conducting similar research in the Lake Tahoe area just weeks earlier. They pumped 40 to 50 liters of water for each sample in Grand Teton National Park and then analyzed it when they returned to California using a microscope and a Raman spectrometer (a laser) to identify the tiny plastics. The spectrometer reportedly showed polystyrene in the Lake Solitude sample and polyethylene in the Two Ocean sample.
