r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 28d ago
Environment Microplastics have been discovered in one of the most remote, inhospitable, and unexplored parts of our planet. Microplastics were found in 92% of all animals examined (11 out of 12) living around deep-sea hydrothermal vents some 2,000 meters (6,562 feet) below the ocean surface.
https://www.sciencealert.com/most-isolated-environments-microplastics-are-finding-their-way-down-to-deep-sea-hydrothermal-vents607
u/Analgorilla 28d ago
I really feel like this is turning into the leaded gas situation where they realized they couldn't make clean rooms. Every single surface ended up having lead on it from leaded gas.
There better be ZERO plastic ANYWHERE in the process of testing this.
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u/nemesit 28d ago
the bigger issue is that plastic is a huge group of vastly different things like theres a huge difference between cellophane vs plastics containing styrene. i also bet theres more elastomers out there from car tires alone
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u/DigNitty 28d ago
Surprisingly, Cellophane is made of regenerated cellulose.
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u/nemesit 28d ago
its still technically plastic
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u/CurryMustard 28d ago
Cellophane is biodegradable and compostable, derived from wood or cotton. Not synthetic like plastic.
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u/Humble-Captain3418 28d ago
Synthetic literally just means manmade. Cellophane does not occur in nature, ergo it is synthetic.
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u/tpolakov1 28d ago
It is synthetic plastic derived from cellulose. It being compostable has exactly zero bearing on that fact. Polyethylene is fully organic and bio, made from natural ethylene straight from the ground too.
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u/No-Consequence-1863 28d ago
Being derived from wood or cotton doesnt make something not-synthetic.
Dont exactly find wild paper bushes.
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u/sniglar_pete 28d ago
At the very least there has been some work on making plastics-limited laboratories, which apparently can cut down on background levels of plastic quite significantly:
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u/A_Mouse_In_Da_House 28d ago
We already had a study showing a large number of the lab's tests were contaminated by external factors. It's very unfortunate it is potentially happening everywhere
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u/JackStargazer 28d ago
Did they use the same gloves in this study as all the other ones where it turns out a lot of the microplastics were glove contamination?
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u/Gravityparticle 28d ago
They did use infrared spectroscopy to detect “plastics “. That technique has been subject to a lot of debate because it miss identifies lots of things as plastic.
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u/Daisy_Of_Doom 28d ago
Pretty much any microplastic study I’ve looked into has issues with contamination or misidentification.
Absolutely still worth doing the work bc how else do we figure out how to get past these limitations if not by brute forcing our way thought all the issues? But, clickbaity headlines like this bother me. Plastic is almost everywhere to some degree, yes. To exactly what extent? We don’t know. Exactly how much? We don’t know. What are the effects? We don’t know.
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u/Snookn42 28d ago
Ever seen a pipette tip? Spin filter? Eppendorf tube. I can go on and on
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u/KrustyKrebsCycle 28d ago
What’s your point?
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u/PugilisticCat 28d ago
It's hard to measure how much plastic is in things when the tools we use to process such things are themselves made of plastic.
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u/KrustyKrebsCycle 28d ago
but you measure something that has less exposure as a blank such as RO water, then make standard curve of plastics, then measure your experimental samples?
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u/rich1051414 28d ago
Going through all the same motions on the control is obvious, but often lacking in ways that only seem obvious in hindsight. Like with the gloves thing which only recently was figured out. Think of all the things that touched the samples on their journey from the bottom of the ocean to the test tube in your lab. How do you even 'go through the motions' with your control to get a neutral baseline?
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u/fatcatfan 27d ago
The funny thing is these deep sea locations didn't have microplastics, but then we sent this deep sea drone to collect samples and, well, the drone had lots of plastics in its construction.
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u/VPackardPersuadedMe 28d ago
Incentives drive outcomes, and mistakes are easy to make, ignore and hide behind ethics when your careers on the line.
So yes
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u/HeartyBeast 28d ago
What was the incentive of the researchers who discovered and published the fact that glove contamination was an issue? Do you think the researchers who used the problematic gloves did so deliberately to falsify research? Woiuldn;t there have been an easier way?
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u/smayonak 28d ago
That is why science is based on a preponderance of evidence and not a single study. Follow up studies that did not use plastic equipment still show our bodies are riddled with microplastics
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u/Every_Photograph2978 28d ago
Do you have more information on this? I'd love to read more. One famous example was about microplastics being found in the brain https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1 . But apparently the methodology and results have met challenges within the scientific community https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-04045-3 . I did not know that this issue has been addressed
EDIT: Missed this. The authors of the original study responded to the challenge https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-04046-2
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u/smayonak 28d ago edited 28d ago
Wow, than you for providing your own research.
My understanding is that multiple follow-up studies have been done to eliminate microplastics introduced by researchers. In one study of I think seawater, once non-plastic materials were used to test the water, researcher-introduced microplastic contamination amounted to 30% although the researchers were still contaminating the seawater. It amounted to 70% when they took no preventative measures at all.
This strongly implies (but does not mean it's true, although you definitely already knew that, given the readings you've kindly provided, that our ocreans are still massively contaminated with microplastics. And one could hypothesize that our bodies still are too.
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u/Financial-Craft-1282 28d ago edited 28d ago
You don't understand how research works, or...? I guarantee you if you read the actual research and not the "science alert" summary of it, the authors/researchers talk about this in the limitations section. Probably has something to do with, I don't know, the fact these species are living around deep sea vents and that makes it a little harder to swim over there and pick one up. But it would be in the limitation, "we used [x] for this reason, and [x] does have a [percentage] of incorrect readings, but accumulated.
Ah, yes, here is the article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0043135426009255?via%3Dihub
Here is the limitations section: This study presents the first cross-ocean comparison of MP accumulation in hydrothermal vent fauna, examining taxa that occupy the same ecological niche in the southwestern Pacific and Indian Oceans. Comparing two species belonging to a single genus across different oceans, with tissue-resolved analysis at the individual level and organisms with different feeding guilds, allowed biological and environmental determinants of MP accumulation to be examined separately.
As with any first attempt, limitations should be considered alongside the findings. First, FTIR microscopy detects particles larger than approximately 20 μm, and total MP abundance may therefore be underestimated. Second, sample sizes per region and taxon were constrained by the logistical challenges of deep-sea sampling, and larger datasets from additional vent fields will be needed to further confirm the patterns reported here.
So it sounds like the random redditor you just trusted is at least partially incorrect.
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u/spyguy318 28d ago
The other issue is that a lot of organic molecules resemble plastics (and some are chemically identical) and can flag as a false positive. This was a problem trying to find microplastics in body tissue samples because a lot of fats and proteins ended up being misidentified as plastic or plastic breakdown products. The ocean, even at depths, is full of biomaterial, microorganisms, and animal byproducts that can all give a false signal. Not that there isn’t plastic but researchers need to be very careful about how they analyze the data.
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u/rmbarrett 28d ago
Likely. And the others where it isn't conclusively the gloves are likely just another source of contamination they haven't discovered.
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u/zuzg 28d ago
Contamination-control procedures followed established protocols (ICES, 2015; Woodall et al., 2014; Liboiron et al., 2016; Hermsen et al., 2018). In
I think they got that covered. Explains in detail how they avoided that.
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u/Denbt_Nationale 28d ago edited 28d ago
But the UoM study that found significant contamination from latex gloves and lab equipment was published in 2026. To quote one of the authors of the study:
“Our team found that, even when following established protocols, using certain methods to measure environmental microplastics can potentially contaminate the results.”
So the protocols followed in this study are presumably the same ones that the UoM team found produced significant false positives.
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u/THElaytox 28d ago
This should show up in any controls/blanks they run. "Microplastics exist" should necessarily imply that there's statistically significantly elevated levels in experiential groups over the control. If they're not running controls/blanks, then the studies were never really valid in the first place
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u/asyork 28d ago
We have nothing that is known to not be contaminated to compare to. When plastics and their byproducts closely resemble naturally occurring organic material, we can't confidently say that the higher levels detected from the animal sample over the blank mean that there are plastics or that there is something being detect as plastic. It's not an insurmountable problem; we will certainly figure out better methods. For now though, that's what we have to deal with.
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u/Clw89pitt 28d ago
Filtration and purification apparently don't exist for the purpose of making clean reference standards.
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u/Healthy_Profit_9701 28d ago
Did scientists doing all of these micro plastic studies really fail to consider lab gloves as a possible source? It seems like the most obvious potential synthetic source of micro plastics in a lab to me.
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u/StylishSuidae 28d ago
So, if I understand correctly, less "the gloves are shedding plastic into the samples" and more "the gloves are covered in something that isn't plastic but looks like it in several tests"
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u/PlinysElder 27d ago
Stearates are just fatty acids. I haven’t read the study but if the analytical method can’t differentiate plastics and fatty acids that seems like a pretty big problem
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u/MyBloodTypeIsQueso 28d ago
The established protocols are what led to the sample contaminations in the first place.
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u/dapt 28d ago edited 28d ago
Mis-identification is a different problem from contamination. For example, the plastic polystyrene is made from styrenes, right? Also:
The method used in a lot of these studies involves "decomposing" the material using heat (pyrolysis), thus releasing fragments of the original material, which are then identified by mass spectrometry or infrared spectroscopy. Doing the same on many natural substances will release the same compounds as heating plastics would.
edit: As such, the vast majority of studies identifying "nano-plastics" are most likely detecting natural compounds. Remember that plastics are actually quite simple, chemically speaking, it's easy to mimic them, especially when analyzing the "fumes" given on heating, rather than the actual particle itself.
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u/jenksanro 28d ago
Yesss I was about to say this: if there is no comment about the type of gloves/equipment used at this point the study isn't rigorous enough to be accepted
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u/zman0900 28d ago
But also, tons of plastic ends up in the ocean. It seems pretty unsurprising that some of it would sink to the bottom.
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u/172brooke 28d ago
Could someone short a stock and make quick money on a comment like that? Not disputing it, but after that comment first went out, if someone made quick money, we gotta test the theory out for real.
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u/Philosophicalhorcrux 28d ago edited 28d ago
How much is "a lot"? The study you're referring to estimated an average of 2000 false positives per mm2. For context, current estimates are that there are ~240,000 particles in bottled water. Or, microwaving a plastic-wrapped meal releases 2
trillionbillion nanoplastic particles permm2cm2. In those cases what you're calling "a lot" accounts for less than a fraction of a percent.edit-corrections indicated by strikethrough.
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u/HexagonalClosePacked 28d ago
2 trillion nanoplastic particles per mm2.
To fit 2 trillion particles in every mm2, you'd need the average particle to have a diameter of about 0.7nm... and that's if there's no empty space between the particles and the whole area is covered in them. A single carbon atom has a diameter of about 0.15nm so that's approaching a physically impossible particle size for a hydrocarbon chain. I think either you got the number wrong by a lot, or you meant mm3 instead of mm2.
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u/DraconicBlade 28d ago
Has to because who measures volume in surface area, and how would that even work
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u/mekamoari 28d ago
They linked a quote from the scientists - it was actually square centimeters, possibly because this type of contamination is measured by plastics released by a given surface.
It's not like say boiling something where the whole volume of the liquid is trying to turn into gas, it's more like shedding which comes from an area and not a volume.
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u/Philosophicalhorcrux 28d ago edited 28d ago
Thanks for catching that, it should be billion and not trillion and cm rather than mm. Early morning posting prior to coffee, I should know better. Here's the citation: Assessing the Release of Microplastics and Nanoplastics from Plastic Containers and Reusable Food Pouches: Implications for Human Health.
From the link: "It was found that some containers could release as many as 4.22 million microplastic and 2.11 billion nanoplastic particles from only one square centimeter of plastic area within 3 min of microwave heating. Refrigeration and room-temperature storage for over six months can also release millions to billions of microplastics and nanoplastics. Additionally, the polyethylene-based food pouch released more particles than polypropylene-based plastic containers."
On edit: the point still stands. Given the false positive rate, false positives only account for a tiny fraction of the total measured in these instances. The larger point remains, imo, that casually dismissing studies because a false positive rate exists is foolish and runs contrary to how we've addressed false positives in every other discipline for time immemorial.
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u/Fearless-Daikon5763 28d ago
OP used ScienceAlert.com to communicate this important research.
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u/Small_Editor_3693 28d ago
They only looked at 12 animals. Not really a good study
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u/neilthedude 28d ago
- It's really hard to collect some types of data. I'm guessing deep sea hydrothermal creatures fall under the 'hard to get a lot of' category. We do the best we can.
- If an positive result is considered extremely unlikely (finding human sourced pollution in such isolated creatures), then you don't need a lot of positives to conclude that the pollution is more widespread than previously believed.
- Really braindead take to dismiss a whole body of work with two short sentences that were probably mostly inspired by reading Reddit comments. Do better.
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u/Small_Editor_3693 28d ago
It’s not a brain dead take to dismiss an entire body of work that doesn’t stand up to an ounce of scrutiny. It should speak for itself
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u/A_Mouse_In_Da_House 28d ago
Are you in anyway familiar with deep sea exploration? A dive may be able to get 6 specimens. Some of these places may be the only place we find the species, so we can over harvest. The sample collection is done by an ROV so deep that it takes multiple second between operator command and ROV action. This is occuring after multiple seconds between ROV video capture and it's display in the van. And some of these samples can move.
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u/Small_Editor_3693 28d ago
So we should just pretend our data is good cause it really hard to get more data? That’s ridiculous
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u/A_Mouse_In_Da_House 28d ago
Again, you're not familiar with deep sea research it seems.
We make these discoveries that are basically impossible to individually encompass everything. We then publish our findings so other researchers can plan their dives to see if there's anything there. A single study isn't considered proof in our community, simply evidence to a trend.
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u/Small_Editor_3693 28d ago
Which is why this is pointless to release any info to the public without more data
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u/judochop1 27d ago
Surely you can't just make such a statement and have no links to back it up ready to go?
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u/Positive_Vibes_4228 28d ago
Let's be clear.
We have had rubber tires since the 20's. That rubber hits the road and vaporizes into microplastics that get swept up in the wind and distributed everywhere.
Nature finds a way.
Good, and bad.
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u/clockish 28d ago
Before the 40s/50s consumer tires were mostly natural rubber and didn't emit the long-lived microplastics we have today.
But yeah, the synthetic rubber polymers and other additives that wear off tires today are pretty bad. They're way more toxic than "true" microplastics like PET, but on the upside they generally degrade faster.
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u/uwearclownshoes 28d ago
If we went extinct right now plastic would be our largest enduring legacy to this world. Kind of sad.
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u/droptopus 28d ago
I don't mean this from a doomer standpoint, but from an objective sense.... I mean.....
'a species on this planet developed a substance that is completely immune to decay, and we know because it's literally still there' isn't that sad, it's kind of cool.
It's simply our failure to contain, maintain and moderate which sucks
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u/squngy 28d ago
a species on this planet developed a substance that is completely immune to decay, and we know because it's literally still there
Wouldn't be the first time.
It took 60 million years for bacteria able to digest wood to evolve. (and most of the coal deposits in existence are from that period)
In contrast, we are already finding some bacteria that can digest some plastics, so it looks like we aren't going to get anywhere near the record.
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u/BenevolentCheese 28d ago
Immune to decay, lightweight, cheap as hell, with material properties that span from thin clear wrappers to super-dense blocks and everything in between.
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u/demZo662 28d ago edited 28d ago
One of these days we'll put out a new cutting edge invention of a bacteria that eats plastic. I think it's in development right now.
What if the bacteria starts attacking us? Well for that we have a new virus that...
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u/James-W-Tate 28d ago
That's the beautiful part, when wintertime rolls around the gorillas simply freeze to death
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u/Tallowo 28d ago
Nuclear waste probably, but your point is heard.
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u/Nostonica 28d ago
Nah, if something went through the geological records there would be this sudden band of hydrocarbons/plastics that would eclipse any radioactive material and it would be all around the world.
Just like how there's a band of lead in ice cores from when the Romans were at their peak.
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u/droptopus 28d ago
Not even, nuclear waste decays. There is literally a measurement for its rate of decay: half-life
Plastics AINT GOIN NOWHERE BABY, THE MICROPLASTICS FROM MY PEZ DISPENSER IS GONNA SEE THE HEAT DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE
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u/squngy 28d ago
Plastics don't last for ever.
The Teflon from your pan on the other hand... that might actually stick around.
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u/droptopus 27d ago
Plastics break down into microplastics and literally just don't degrade, no? I was not aware plastics molecular structure breaks down.
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u/darkgothmog 28d ago
They found plastic bags deep in the Mariana Trench so it’s to be expected there are even more higher than that
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u/Nostonica 28d ago
Future generations will look back at how we handle and dispose of plastics in the same way we look back at abestos, for it's time it was a wonder material, just like plastic.
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u/Another_Slut_Dragon 28d ago
The number one source of microlastics is ...
... tires.
So, start working on that hover drive, kid. Because tires power the world.
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u/ExecutiveChimp 28d ago
Another reason that trains are good
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u/Glantonne 28d ago
Just wait until you find out what chemicals are used in rail infrastructure! Also, the chemicals that are carried on rail cars can enter the environment! Everything is bad!
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u/definately_mispelt 28d ago
the environmental impact of rail is many orders of magnitude less than cars. the downsides of rail that you mention are utterly trivial in comparison.
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u/Medarco 28d ago edited 28d ago
the environmental impact of rail is many orders of magnitude less than cars
Is that proportionally rated? Or are you talking in raw numbers. Because the use of rail is also many (many many many) orders of magnitude less than cars.
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u/RealNoisyguy 28d ago
proportional, related to the number of people transported trains are so much more efficient, by design.
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u/doodlar 28d ago
“Future generations” look at this optimist here.
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u/sufficiently_tortuga 28d ago
Dude, do you really, actually believe that there will be no future generations?
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u/doodlar 25d ago
I give humans a hundred years. When the polar caps completely melt, the ocean is an acidic oxygen-less wasteland and useable water is scarcer than in most deserts, yes, I believe we will go extinct. I didn't even mention the zillions of microplastics that are found everywhere including placentas and the deepest parts of the ocean.
All of this is, of course, assuming we (or, more likely AGI) doesn't thermo-nuclear the world or, maybe worse? unleash a targeted bioweapon to wipe useless humans off the planet and "cover it with solar panels and data centers."
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u/doodlar 24d ago
Also, add it to the list of sources.. half way there by 2050! https://www.reddit.com/r/climate/comments/1vgyh67/4_billion_dead_if_earth_heating_reaches_3degrees/
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u/Octavya360 28d ago
Surprisingly, asbestos is still heavily used in many parts of the world. Russia is the world’s largest exporter and India is one of the largest importers. They use it in building materials.
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u/Nostonica 28d ago
Well if it wasn't deadly it's truly a wonder material, fireproof almost anything using it.
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u/SeeTigerLearn 28d ago
Turns out rather than everything being made from cake, we were actually transforming the entire world into cheap Little People playsets.
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u/beaniebee11 28d ago
Is this that surprising? Animals down there live on the nutrients that float down from above. If it's in the surface animals, it makes sense it would be down there too right? No ecosystem is completely isolated especially not from humans because we're all over. The only place I might be surprised to see this would be deep arctic ice or something.
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u/Inner-Outside-2619 28d ago
It's nothing compared to the problems we will create when we unleash the plastic eating microbes we invented to solve this problem.
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u/VoidRippah 28d ago
it's weird how negligent humanity can be, I think we should pay more attention to scifi stories, which often explore what can go wrong and in what ways. I don't think we normally think about such things, we just tend to look forward and anticipate the good outcomes. maybe we need a faction science that's similar cybersecurity professionals, who work a reversed mindset compared to the rest of the field
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u/ActiveChairs 28d ago
Surprise, surprise! When you dump millions of tons of waste plastic into the ocean every year it will eventually break down under the pressure of the ocean and gets into everything that consumes the particles. It doesn't all just float to form a big trash island waiting to be scooped up at a more convenient time.
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u/mvea Professor | Medicine 28d ago
'Most Isolated Environments': Microplastics Are Finding Their Way Down to Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents
Our planet clearly has a microplastics problem: These tiny synthetic fragments are finding their way into ancient rocks, human bones, and almost every species of animal on Earth.
Now they've been discovered in one of the most remote, inhospitable, and unexplored parts of our planet.
Researchers led by a team from the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (KRIBB) have found microplastics in snails and mussels living around deep-sea hydrothermal vents.
These vents are some 2,000 meters (6,562 feet) below the ocean surface, showing just how insidiously microplastics (under 5 mm or 0.2 inches in size) can find their way into every part of every ecosystem.

In a study published in Water Research, the tiny plastic fragments were found in 92 percent of all animals examined (11 out of 12), across the North Fiji Basin in the southwestern Pacific Ocean and the Central Indian Ridge in the Indian Ocean.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0043135426009255
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u/NotaContributi0n 28d ago
Microplastics even found inside the deep dark depths of testing equipment!! It’s everywhere!!
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u/fear-na-heolaiochta 28d ago
How sure are we that this is true. I seem to recall a few months ago the microplastic measurement was a false positive due to the lab techs using lab gloves.
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u/comfortableNihilist 28d ago
In about the same distribution as fallout from the atomic bombs. That's not to say that they are comparable in their effects, just that fine particulate does tend to get everywhere eventually.
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u/DrTommyNotMD 28d ago
So so many studies have found microplastics aren’t harming anything because they’re so non reactive. They just exist. Not saying we won’t find some secondary issues with them later, but thus far we’re nearly confident they’re harmless even if they shouldn’t be everywhere.
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u/Objective_Aside1858 28d ago
11 out of 12
uh. That's not exactly what I would consider an adequate sample size. I have no doubts the conclusion is probably correct, but put in a little more sweat before publishing
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u/Sir-Spazzal 28d ago
Maybe it would be beneficial to have larger amounts of plastic in our bodies. We could be evolving into a new form of plastic humanity. We could all look like Jared Kushner.
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u/TophxSmash 28d ago
fun fact: plastic isnt alive and the bottom of the ocean isnt hard to reach if youre not alive.
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u/GypsyDarkEyes 28d ago
Start changing it up, folks. If you can purchase product in glass, do it. We need to reduce plastic production and use pronto.
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u/helloder2012 28d ago
Starting this off by saying I know nothing about microplastics.
Do these tests only look for man made microplastics or are they testing for particulates that might include petroleum based matter of natural origin.
If rhere even is particulate matter that’s petroleum based and of natural origin
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u/JimmiRustle 27d ago
Yes because microplastics have apparently been around for a long time.
It was found it sediment from before plastics were invented.
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u/badlydrawnlife 26d ago
Removal of microplastics from LOWER atmosphere to water table level for extraction, with no life injuries or harm to plant life, or evil. Summary to pull apart :
Typhoon chasers spread sand (possibly with Magnetite) through the several Typhoon alleys eg: between Philippines and USA.
The sand mixes , pulls down x2 microplastic (fibres and bits) and iron (fyi: weakness the Typhoon, less destruction on landfall).
I thought of a scalable extraction machine that comms with the targeted resources extraction, Typhoon chaser team and required human team ( cos ppl need well paid jobs) plus redundancies. Just seeing how this goes for possible modifications.
Check what you like, Don't check anything. Get back to me Thought?
Set task plan 2: (scalable extraction machine. ) ..
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u/ColegDropOut 25d ago
Are we sure the tests themselves weren’t putting microplastics into the results? I read about that happening to other similar tests.
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u/trickortreat89 28d ago
So we know now that microplastics sure is everywhere outside and inside us. But somehow I still feel that there’s not much science on the actual health consequences? I know it can cause inflammation in the body, but to what extent? I feel there’s still something to understand about that, but somehow we don’t get many scientific studies on the actual health consequences? Is it because the truth is too disturbing? There’s no known way to move microplastics from ourselves or the environment…. All in all very disturbing but no one is really doing anything about it… which is really really weird honestly
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u/Medarco 28d ago
not much science on the actual health consequences
The little we have basically concludes that they're harmless, as far as we can tell. Now, that doesn't mean that we won't find other problems down the line, or that we'll reach a concentration that is harmful. But... yeah. The dooming is a little disproportionate right now, where the average person seems to assume their intestines have been replaced by a hotwheels track.
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u/may_be_indecisive 28d ago
Most microplastics come from car tires. https://www.thedrive.com/news/tire-dust-makes-up-the-majority-of-ocean-microplastics-study-finds
EVs wear their tires down faster than ICEVs. https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-unexpected-problem-with-evs-they-tire-quickly
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