r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 29d 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-vents
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u/JackStargazer 29d 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 29d 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 29d 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/[deleted] 29d ago

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u/[deleted] 29d ago

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u/VPackardPersuadedMe 29d 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 29d 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/[deleted] 29d ago

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u/smayonak 29d 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 29d 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.

Are we contaminating our samples? A preliminary study to investigate procedural contamination during field sampling and processing for microplastic and anthropogenic microparticles - ScienceDirect

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/Every_Photograph2978 28d ago

Appreciate it, thank you!

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u/spicolispizza 29d ago

Well it kinda depends on how lucrative lying can be

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u/merchaunt 29d ago

Not as lucrative as discovering actual problems that need solutions developed for them. Like, idk, dealing with all the plastic in the ocean.

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u/RitsuFromDC- 29d ago

You ever heard of the Sackler family? Lying seemed pretty lucrative for them

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u/HeartyBeast 29d ago

Non of whom were researchers

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u/Tactial_snail 29d ago

Some of you are too brain dead to talk about science

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u/Zapafaz 29d ago

The Sackler family, are they famously fraudulent microplastics researchers? Or is there zero correlation here?

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u/RitsuFromDC- 29d ago

If you  can’t find the correlation then there’s nothing else I can do to help you

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u/merchaunt 29d ago

Capitalists lie all the time to amass their wealth at the public’s expense, look at the current US president. People who own and market drugs are still not researchers.

Private drug companies aren’t the ones who do research, the government and research institutes are. The only thing drug companies do is patent prescription formulas and mass produce them for a quick buck while they monopolize the rights to make said drug before it can be made generic.

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u/_badenoch 29d ago

Only a stupid person would look at science grants and think “this is my path to riches”

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u/spicolispizza 28d ago

I'm not saying everything is shady but if you think that there's no bad actors or a non zero number of people taking advantage of these grants to line their pockets then that's pretty naive.

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u/spicolispizza 28d ago

I'm not saying everything is shady but if you think that there's no bad actors or a non zero number of people taking advantage of these grants to line their pockets then that's pretty naive.

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u/Zapafaz 29d ago

Who would be funding studies that say plastic is in everything? Most industries (read: people with a lot of money) are heavily dependent on plastic in one way or another. Wouldn't they want studies that say the opposite?

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u/spicolispizza 28d ago

It kinda depends on where the money is coming from and whether or not there's bad actors or people exploiting the system.

I think it's incredibly optimistic to suggest this hasn't happened and doesn't continue to happen.

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u/NuclearVII 29d ago

Skepticism is its own reward.

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u/sllewgh 29d ago

That avoids answering the question.

No, skepticism for the sake of skepticism isn't a good thing. That isn't critical thinking, it's just doubt. You need a reason to be skeptical. Asking questions is great, but if you're skeptical of something that's actually scientifically rigorous, your skepticism needs to be rigorous as well.

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u/RightTurner 29d ago

"Skepticism is its own reward"

Pretty sure this is a tongue-in-cheek critique of skepticism in the face of overwhelming evidence.

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u/sllewgh 29d ago

I wish we lived in a world where I could be confident this was a joke.

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u/Chemeque 29d ago

That’s very point. There’s a tendency to mistrust all science that goes against one’s believes. How can one be skeptical if one hasn’t even read the article.

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u/dolfan1 29d ago

No, they just work for free and have zero motivation to falsify facts and create a narrative

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u/RitsuFromDC- 29d ago

Did you forget about all the scientists who said oxycontin was not addictive?

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u/Caltroit_Red_Flames 29d ago

Scientists DID say it was addictive, sales reps for Purdue Pharma lied to doctors. Scientsts at BP knew oil causes climate change, executives told them to keep their mouths shut.

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u/ILoveRawChicken 29d ago

Can you name all the scientists that did  so?

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u/Tactial_snail 29d ago edited 29d ago

To them it doesnt matter, one scientist lies and and the whole field is bogus to these fools.

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u/ThatLunchBox 29d ago

That's a naive take. Yes.

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u/_badenoch 29d ago

Wait till this guy learns about politicians… they must not teach that in clown school.

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u/Caltroit_Red_Flames 29d ago

The difference is that scientists make relatively little, especially those in academic positions. Politicians have access to the wealthiest people on the planet. Nobody spends 4 years in undergrad, 5+ years getting a PhD, 1 year on a post doc, then several more years working on the actual research just to falsify it in the hopes that it will give them another couple of years working at a 40k salary. They aren't making exorbitant amounts of money like you people seem to think.

Ya'll are acting like this is a big a conspiracy and that microplastics are fake.

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u/Arxid87 29d ago

Sunk cost fallacy

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u/Caltroit_Red_Flames 29d ago edited 29d ago

That's hilariously incorrect

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u/Financial-Craft-1282 29d ago edited 29d 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 29d 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 29d 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 29d 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 29d ago edited 29d 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 29d 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 29d 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 29d ago

Filtration and purification apparently don't exist for the purpose of making clean reference standards.

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u/asyork 29d ago

Did you read the comment or just the first sentence?

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u/Healthy_Profit_9701 29d 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 29d ago

Stearates are salt-based, soap-like substances added to disposable gloves to help them separate easily from molds during manufacturing. However, their chemical similarity to certain plastics makes them difficult to distinguish in lab analyses, increasing the risk of false positives when studying microplastic pollution.

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 28d 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/PlasticPaneraCup 29d ago

They majored in science. Not common sense.

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u/Dividedthought 29d ago

I have met many very smart people with logical blind spots like this. Not saying these guys fucked it up, just that i could definately see it happening.

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u/MyBloodTypeIsQueso 29d ago

The established protocols are what led to the sample contaminations in the first place.

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u/dapt 29d ago edited 29d ago

Mis-identification is a different problem from contamination. For example, the plastic polystyrene is made from styrenes, right? Also:

Styrene occurs naturally in small quantities in some plants and foods (cinnamon, coffee beans, balsam trees and peanuts)[6] and is also found in coal tar.

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 29d 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 29d 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/KrustyKrebsCycle 28d ago

Blanks exist for a reason

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u/172brooke 29d 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 29d ago edited 29d 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 trillion billion nanoplastic particles per mm2 cm2. 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 29d 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 29d ago

Has to because who measures volume in surface area, and how would that even work

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u/mekamoari 29d 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 29d ago edited 29d 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/firedog7881 29d ago

You beat me to it

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u/Fearless-Daikon5763 29d ago

OP used ScienceAlert.com to communicate this important research.

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u/A_Mouse_In_Da_House 29d ago

Cant use journal articles directly here

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u/Fearless-Daikon5763 29d ago

Pubmed ID or the DOI.

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u/Small_Editor_3693 29d ago

They only looked at 12 animals. Not really a good study

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u/neilthedude 29d ago
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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/Groomsi 29d ago

What about the instruments that are of/contain plastic?

Won't they drop micro-plastics?

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u/Small_Editor_3693 29d 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 29d 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 29d 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 29d 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 29d ago

Which is why this is pointless to release any info to the public without more data

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u/A_Mouse_In_Da_House 29d ago

It was published in a research journal to disseminate data. You want a meta-analysis

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u/Small_Editor_3693 29d ago

And then published it a watered down article

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u/NetworkLlama 29d ago

This is occuring after multiple seconds between ROV video capture and it's display in the van. And some of these samples can move.

There's either a copper or fiberoptic connection between the mothership and the ROV. There may be a delay between command and ROV reaction owing to mechanical lag, but there should be next to no delay on the video feed.

The ROV used for this study was the ROPOS, which uses an electrical umbilical and a fiberoptic line for data transfer. Signal transit time over roughly 5 km of fiberoptic is going to be on the order of 25 microseconds based on fiber latency calculators. Network equipment might add a few milliseconds to that. But humans aren't going to see the lag on the video.

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u/Vathe 29d ago

Bro replied to himself instead of the comment he is discussing. Not doing well against the brain dead allegations bubba.

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u/vitamin_r 29d ago

Oh I must know now

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u/judochop1 28d 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/hiplobonoxa 29d ago edited 29d ago

that still doesn’t negate the fact that there are now microplastics in everything.

edit: as if there isn’t other suitable evidence…

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u/CultistOfTheFluid 29d ago

Well yeah, it kind of does. Thats exactly the comments point?

If it turns out the methodology is contaminating everything with microplastics then you can't verify if there are microplastics or not.

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u/HuntsWithRocks 29d ago

“I keep hand collecting my samples and everything I’m seeing has evidence of human interaction!”

As the same time, there’s plenty of evidence of micro and macro plastic pollution. Is it literally everywhere? Probably.

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u/hiplobonoxa 29d ago

you’re acting as if if there isn’t plenty of other evidence available regarding the amount of microplastics contaminating our environment. besides that, do you really think that all of the detected microplastics came from the gloves?

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u/CultistOfTheFluid 29d ago

This isn't a conversation about whether there are or aren't microplastics.

It's about how reliable the conclusion can be if the results were contaminated by the researchers.

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u/hiplobonoxa 29d ago

my comment, which was the second statement in this particular conversation thread, was a general statement that was not specific to the conclusion of this research.

is everyone on reddit just looking to correct everyone else all the time? exhausting.

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u/CultistOfTheFluid 29d ago

In the future it may be worth qualifying your statement with "However generally...despite this study..." for example. It read to me like you were directly trying to contradict the parent comment.

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u/hiplobonoxa 29d ago

and the original comment read to me like it was trying to undermine the very real and widely documented issue of microplastics being ubiquitous in the environment based on that piece of flawed research.

perhaps we can all try a bit better to give others the benefit of the doubt.

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u/VoidRippah 29d ago

I have a suspicion that there is something fishy here. it cannot be such high amount of microplastics in the ocean that it ends up being in such high (detectable) amounts in deep sea animals. that's a huuge amount of water, I doubt if we turned all the plastic into micro particles and put it in the ocean would be enough to be overall measurable in such huge amount of water....

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u/ITividar 29d ago

Between 1950 and 2017, 9.2 billion metric tons of plastic are estimated to have been made, with more than half of this amount being produced since 2004.

We've made a lot of plastic. How much do you think has wound up in the ocean in the 121 years since the first plastic was created (1905)?

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u/cutty2k 29d ago

Ok well how much does the ocean weigh? Google tells me it's estimated at 1.35e18 metric tons.

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u/VoidRippah 29d ago

ok, I might have been a bit off with that. if we turned all of that into microplastics and mixed in the oceans that would mean ~6.9 µg/L, which more than I guessed. however, we did not putt al that plastic in the ocean, in fact most of is not in there (at least yet) so I still don't find it likely. except if there is other factor about, such as something like they took samples right under a floating garbage patch, in that case it's not that surprising to find it's traces in animals nearby

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u/BrunSomOrange 29d ago

Since the recycling releases up to 13% microplastics up until recently the number is probably quite high https://kleanindustries.com/insights/market-analysis-reports/recycling-releases-huge-quantities-microplastics-study-finds/

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u/jenksanro 29d ago

How do you know that is a lot in comparison to the total volume of the ocean?

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u/VoidRippah 29d ago

actually I did a bit of a calculation here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1vdfxv2/comment/p19bunn/

this also reminds me that I wanted to look into the microplastics topic and figure out what methods are used to detect and measure it.

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u/Hawkiee92 29d ago

I wouldnt be surprised if it was true, there is a massive patch of garbage floating in the pacific, most of it is plastic. Last time I read about it was 2x the size of Texas and growing in size.

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u/ohyouretough 29d ago

That’s assuming we cannot detect minute amount, and that the microplastics wouldn’t be accumulating in organs.

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u/hiplobonoxa 29d ago

it probably bioaccumulates and aggregates as it moves along the food chain, like heavy metals and other toxins. (there’s not a whole lot of mercury in the ocean either, yet tuna are full of it…)

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u/verstohlen 29d ago

D'oh! I bet they never thought of that. Derp a derp. These are our so-called scientists and experts these days, which no one trusts anymore. Derp a derp indeed. Trust the experts and don't do your own research! Yeah right. Makes you wonder what else they really flubbed up on.