From tiny pellets to creepy wave-battered baby dolls, the Texas coast is a notable hot spot for plastic debris.
From tiny pellets to creepy wave-battered baby dolls, the Texas coast is a notable hot spot for plastic debris.
But when researchers from The University of Texas at Austin went searching for microplastics in sediments pulled from the bottom of Matagorda Bay and its surrounding inlets, they didn’t find much.
Most of their samples contained only tens to hundreds of microplastic particles for each kilogram of sediment. This is hundreds to thousands of times less than other bayside environments around the world.
Their findings, which were published in Environmental Science & Technology, suggest that rather than settling at the bottom of the bay, microplastics are being swept out to the wider Gulf of Mexico.
Read more at The University of Texas at Austin
Image: Larger plastic fragments and other debris pulled from a sediment sample taken from along the Texas coast. (Credit: Jackson School of Geosciences / Institute for Geophysics)
