The Dolphins are not gonna like this.

The human caused great extinction will have a thin layer of plastic derived chemicals in the rock layers: denoting it and used as a marker by (non human) geologists hundreds of millions of years by now .

Much like iridium is found at the end of the Cretaceous

Wagner cautioned that the study’s major extrapolation — that there are 27 million metric tons of nanoplastic in the North Atlantic, more than the weight of 26,000 Eiffel towers — relies on “very few samples.” Still, Wagner said it makes sense that there would be an exorbitant amount of nanoplastic given the high volume of larger plastic fragments that end up in the oceans each year. According to the United Nations, roughly 20 million tons of plastic enter aquatic ecosystems each year. This includes lakes, rivers, and streams, as well as oceans, but for much of that pollution, the ocean is the final destination.

“We’ve basically been dumping plastic in the ocean for decades,” Woodruff said. “It doesn’t go away, it just breaks down into smaller plastics, so it does make sense that you would find more nanoplastics than macro and microplastics.”

nanoplastic — plastic particles 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

I hate this type of dumbed down description with the actual info removed. It's like when someone describes the capacity of a hard drive in terms of "libraries of congress" or "feet of stacked paper" instead of gigabytes or terabytes. We all use hard drives and know what a terabyte is, so give us the plain info.

Anyway, clicking the Nature link shows that nanoplastic means less than 1 micron diameter. That's much simpler than making us look up the diameter of a human hair to find out how big the plastic is.

does this count as a carbon sink

The news just keeps getting worse, doesn't it?

…and so we will push the importance of recycling even harder, blaming the consumer instead of holding the plastic industry accountable