Is the world being destroyed?

"Alarming" levels of microplastic have been found in major rivers across Europe according to scientists in 14 studies published simultaneously Monday.

"The pollution is present in all European rivers" studied, said French scientist Jean-François Ghiglione, who coordinated the large-scale operation across nine major rivers from the Thames to the Tiber.

"Alarming" pollution of on average "three microplastics per cubic meter of water" was observed in all of them, according to the results published in the journal of Environmental Science and Pollution Research.

This is far from the 40 microplastics per cubic meter recorded in the world's 10 most polluted rivers—the Yellow River, Yangtze, Mekong, Ganges, Nile, Niger, Indus, Amur, Pearl and Hai—which irrigate countries where most plastic is produced or plastic waste is processed.

But this does not take into account the volume of water flowing.

3,000 particles per second

On the Rhone in Valence, France, the fast flow means there are "3,000 plastic particles every second", said Ghiglione. The Seine in Paris has around 900 per second.

"The mass of microplastics invisible to the naked eye is more significant than that of the visible ones," said Ghiglione—a result that "surprised" researchers. This was confirmed by analytical advances made during the studies, which began in 2019.

"Large microplastics float and are collected at the surface, while invisible ones are distributed throughout the water column and are ingested by many animals and organisms," said Ghiglione, head of research in marine microbial ecotoxicology at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Samples were collected from the mouths of the rivers Elbe, Ebro, Garonne, Loire, Rhone, Rhine, Seine, Thames and the Tiber by some 40 chemists, biologists and physicists from 19 research laboratories.


Industrial plastic granules known as 'mermaid tears' are scattered everywhere.

The researchers then made their way upstream until they reached the first major city on each of the waterways.

"Microplastics are smaller than a grain of rice," said Alexandra Ter Halle, a chemist at the CNRS in Toulouse, who took part in the analysis.

'Mermaid tears'

The particles are less than five millimeters in size, with the smallest invisible to the naked eye.

These include synthetic textile fibers from washing clothes and microplastics released from car tires or when unscrewing plastic bottle caps.

Researchers also found virgin plastic pellets, the raw granules used to manufacture plastic products.

One of the studies identified a virulent bacterium on a microplastic in the Loire in France, capable of causing infections in humans.

Another unexpected finding was that a quarter of microplastics discovered in rivers are not derived from waste but come from industrial plastic pellets.

These granules, dubbed "mermaid tears", can also sometimes be found scattered along beaches after maritime incidents.

"What we see is the pollution is diffuse and established" and "comes from everywhere" in the rivers, he added.

"The international scientific coalition we are part of (as part of international UN negotiations on reducing plastic pollution) is calling for a major reduction in the production of primary plastic because we know that plastic production is directly linked to pollution," he said.

Researchers say problem could increase number of people at risk of starvation by 400m in next two decades

The pollution of the planet by microplastics is significantly cutting food supplies by damaging the ability of plants to photosynthesise, according to a new assessment.

The analysis estimates that between 4% and 14% of the world’s staple crops of wheat, rice and maize is being lost due to the pervasive particles. It could get even worse, the scientists said, as more microplastics pour into the environment.

About 700 million people were affected by hunger in 2022. The researchers estimated that microplastic pollution could increase the number at risk of starvation by another 400 million in the next two decades, calling that an “alarming scenario” for global food security.

Other scientists called the research useful and timely but cautioned that this first attempt to quantify the impact of microplastics on food production would need to be confirmed and refined by further data-gathering and research.

The annual crop losses caused by microplastics could be of a similar scale to those caused by the climate crisis in recent decades, the researchers behind the new research said. The world is already facing a challenge to produce sufficient food sustainably, with the global population expected to rise to 10 billion by around 2058.

Microplastics are broken down from the vast quantities of waste dumped into the environment. They hinder plants from harnessing sunlight to grow in multiple ways, from damaging soils to carrying toxic chemicals. The particles have infiltrated the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans.

“Humanity has been striving to increase food production to feed an ever-growing population [but] these ongoing efforts are now being jeopardised by plastic pollution,” said the researchers, led by Prof Huan Zhong, at Nanjing University in China. “The findings underscore the urgency [of cutting pollution] to safeguard global food supplies in the face of the growing plastic crisis.”

People’s bodies are already widely contaminated by microplastics, consumed through food and water. They have been found in blood, brains, breast milk, placentas and bone marrow. The impact on human health is largely unknown, but they have been linked to strokes and heart attacks.

Prof Denis Murphy, at the University of South Wales, said: “This analysis is valuable and timely in reminding us of the potential dangers of microplastic pollution and the urgency of addressing the issue, [but] some of the major headline figures require more research before they can be accepted as robust predictions.”

The new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, combined more than 3,000 observations of the impact of microplastics on plants, taken from 157 studies.

Previous research has indicated that microplastics can damage plants in multiple ways. The polluting particles can block sunlight reaching leaves and damage the soils on which the plants depend. When taken up by plants, microplastics can block nutrient and water channels, induce unstable molecules that harm cells and release toxic chemicals, which can reduce the level of the photosynthetic pigment chlorophyll.

The researchers estimated that microplastics reduced the photosynthesis of terrestrial plants by about 12% and by about 7% in marine algae, which are at the base of the ocean food web. They then extrapolated this data to calculate the reduction in the growth of wheat, rice and maize and in the production of fish and seafood.

Asia was hardest hit by estimated crop losses, with reductions in all three of between 54m and 177m tonnes a year, about half the global losses. Wheat in Europe was also hit hard as was maize in the United States. Other regions, such as South America and Africa, grow less of these crops but have much less data on microplastic contamination.

In the oceans, where microplastics can coat algae, the loss of fish and seafood was estimated at between 1m and 24m tonnes a year, about 7% of the total and enough protein to feed tens of millions of people.

The scientists also used a second method to assess the impact of microplastics on food production, a machine-learning model based on current data on microplastic pollution levels. It produced similar results, they said.

“Importantly, these adverse effects are highly likely to extend from food security to planetary health,” Zhong and his colleagues said. Reduced photosynthesis due to microplastics may be also cutting the amount of climate-heating CO2 taken from the atmosphere by the huge phytoplankton blooms in the Earth’s oceans and unbalancing other ecosystems.

Prof Richard Lampitt, at the UK’s National Oceanography Centre, said the conclusions should be treated with caution. “I have considerable concerns about the quality of the original data used by the model and this has led to overspeculation about the effects of plastic contamination on food supplies,” he said. The researchers acknowledged that more data was needed and said this would produce more accurate estimates.

The world’s nations failed to reach an agreement on a UN treaty to curb plastic pollution in December, but will restart the talks in August. The scientists said their study was “important and timely for the ongoing negotiations and the development of action plans and targets”.

Prof Richard Thompson, at the University of Plymouth said the new study added to the evidence pointing towards the need for action. “While the predictions may be refined as new data become available, it is clear … that we need to start towards solutions. Ensuring the treaty addresses microplastic pollution is of key importance,” he said.

Climate-warming carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere grew at a record-breaking speed in 2024, surging by 3.7 parts per million, a recent NOAA data analysis has found.

It’s one of the agency’s biggest scientific findings of the year — yet the research largely has flown under the radar after NOAA officials took steps to minimize the announcement.

Instead of publishing a press release or a featured article online, the agency described the findings only in social media posts on Facebook and on X. And the posts failed to highlight the dataset’s most important finding: that last year’s CO₂ concentrations jumped by an unprecedented amount.

That’s a departure from the agency’s historical approach to public communication. NOAA typically releases a public report each spring, prominently featured on its website, describing the previous year’s greenhouse gas concentrations. It also usually sends a press release to members of the media.

Last year’s report, for instance, noted that carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide concentrations all continued to climb in the atmosphere in 2023.

According to a source with knowledge of the 2024 analysis, NOAA staff prepared a public web story this year as usual. But officials nixed the report at the last minute, instead releasing the findings only on social media. The source was granted anonymity because they feared reprisal from the Trump administration.

A NOAA communications officer did not respond to a request for comment.

The move is part of a broader assault on NOAA science and public communications by the new administration.

Last month, the agency confirmed it was ending its regular monthly climate briefings, in which NOAA scientists presented climate and weather data to the media. That's on top of widespread layoffs this year at the agency. And a recent proposal from the White House Office of Management and Budget would dramatically reorganize the agency and terminate much of its climate work — eliminating its entire Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research.

A NOAA official suggested that downplaying the new CO₂ data has dampened media attention on what otherwise would have been a major climate headline. The scientific findings were reported earlier this month by The Washington Post, and the suppressed web story was reported by CNN earlier this week. There’s otherwise been little news reported on the subject.

But scientists say it’s a finding that’s worth more attention — and more worry. Some researchers believe last year’s CO₂ spike is evidence that the Earth system itself is becoming more vulnerable to the impacts of rising temperatures.

Natural landscapes, such as forests and wetlands, historically have acted as a carbon sink — soaking up excess CO₂ emissions and helping to offset some of the impacts of climate change. But some of these ecosystems may be breaking down under the stress of continued warming, with the added side effects of droughts and wildfires. And they’re storing less carbon in the process.

“In my opinion, there is no reason to believe that this will not continue with further dry years in the future,” said Philippe Ciais, a climate scientist at the Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace in France.

Ciais was not involved with the NOAA analysis, but he co-authored a recent preliminary study — not yet peer-reviewed — investigating the reasons for high CO₂ growth in 2023 and the first half of 2024. The study included a variety of real-life data sources, including satellite measurements, as well as complex Earth system models. And it found that some of the Earth’s natural carbon sinks are declining.

The tropics, in particular, began to lose an unusually high amount of carbon beginning in the middle of 2023, Ciais said. That’s due in part to an increase in drought and wildfires in places such as the Amazon. Those losses continued into 2024 — and while the study’s timeline ends at the beginning of last July, Ciais suspects they’ve probably continued into 2025 as well.

The effects are partly due to the influence of El Niño, a natural climate cycle that causes periodic drying in the tropics. But that can’t explain everything. For one thing, the recent El Niño was not particularly strong compared with some other recent events. And it also ended in the first half of 2024, while dry conditions persisted in the tropics for the rest of the year.

More studies are needed to fully understand what happened in 2024. But Ciais and other scientists are worried last year’s events could point to a kind of climate feedback loop in which rising temperatures cause natural ecosystems to deteriorate, releasing more carbon into the atmosphere and causing the planet to warm even faster.

“With one year you cannot say that all the future will be lost,” Ciais cautioned.

But he’s worried the Earth might be on track to warm more rapidly than some scientists — and world leaders — expect. Many climate models don’t account for an increasingly rapid breakdown of Earth’s natural ecosystems, accelerated by wildfires, droughts, pests and other climate-related disasters.

Meanwhile, studies have found that fossil fuel emissions also reached a record high in 2024. Those emissions can’t account for last year’s CO₂ surge all on their own. But they’re part of the puzzle, and a major indicator that the world is not tackling global warming quickly enough to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate goals.

“The policy goals say, well, we still have some time to reach 2 degrees,” Ciais said. “But all these predictions are based on the fact that the carbon absorption will stay good.”

Abstract

Land subsidence is a slow-moving hazard with adverse environmental and socioeconomic consequences worldwide. While often considered solely a coastal hazard due to relative sea-level rise, subsidence also threatens inland urban areas, causing increased flood risks, structural damage and transportation disruptions. However, spatially dense subsidence rates that capture granular variations at high spatial density are often lacking, hindering assessment of associated infrastructure risks. Here we use space geodetic measurements from 2015 to 2021 to create high-resolution maps of subsidence rates for the 28 most populous US cities. We estimate that at least 20% of the urban area is sinking in all cities, mainly due to groundwater extraction, affecting ~34 million people. Additionally, more than 29,000 buildings are located in high and very high damage risk areas, indicating a greater likelihood of infrastructure damage. These datasets and information are crucial for developing ad hoc policies to adapt urban centers to these complex environmental challenges.

Millions of kilometers of rivers around the world are carrying antibiotic pollution at levels high enough to promote drug resistance and harm aquatic life, a McGill University-led study warns.

Published in PNAS Nexus, the study is the first to estimate the scale of global river contamination from human antibiotics use. Researchers calculated that about 8,500 tons of antibiotics—nearly one-third of what people consume annually—end up in river systems around the world each year even after, in many cases, passing through wastewater systems.

"While the amounts of residues from individual antibiotics translate into only very small concentrations in most rivers, which makes them very difficult to detect, the chronic and cumulative environmental exposure to these substances can still pose a risk to human health and aquatic ecosystems," said Heloisa Ehalt Macedo, a postdoctoral fellow in geography at McGill and lead author of the study.

The research team used a global model validated by field data from nearly 900 river locations. They found that amoxicillin, the world's most-used antibiotic, is the most likely to be present at risky levels, especially in Southeast Asia, where rising use and limited wastewater treatment amplify the problem.

"This study is not intended to warn about the use of antibiotics—we need antibiotics for global health treatments—but our results indicate that there may be unintended effects on aquatic environments and antibiotic resistance, which calls for mitigation and management strategies to avoid or reduce their implications," said Bernhard Lehner, a professor in global hydrology in McGill's Department of Geography and co-author of the study.

The findings are especially notable because the study did not consider antibiotics from livestock or pharmaceutical factories, both of which are major contributors to environmental contamination.

"Our results show that antibiotic pollution in rivers arising from human consumption alone is a critical issue, which would likely be exacerbated by veterinary or industry sources of related compounds," said Jim Nicell, an environmental engineering professor at McGill and co-author of the study. "Monitoring programs to detect antibiotic or other chemical contamination of waterways are therefore needed, especially in areas that our model predicts to be at risk."