Is the world being destroyed?

The LORD said, “I am going to destroy everything on earth, all human beings and animals, birds and fish. I will bring about the downfall of the wicked. I will destroy the whole human race, and no survivors will be left.

Or like those in the day of Noah, will we ridicule those who are prepared to make those necessary preparations, until they were swept away with the waters of the flood?

Summary: Tiny plastic particles aren’t just choking oceans and cities—they’re quietly infiltrating forests too. Scientists discovered that most microplastics arrive through the air, settling onto treetops before being washed or dropped to the forest floor in rain and falling leaves. Once there, natural processes like leaf decay help bury and store these particles deep in the soil. The findings reveal forests as hidden reservoirs of airborne pollution—and potentially a new frontline in the growing microplastics crisis.


The research team developed a customized method for analyzing microplastics on leaf surfaces. Credit: Collin Weber

Microplastics and nanoplastics are widely known for contaminating oceans, rivers, and farmland. New research now shows they are also accumulating in forests. Geoscientists at TU Darmstadt report this finding in a study published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, highlighting a largely overlooked form of environmental pollution.

The study reveals that forests are not just affected by local pollution sources. Instead, most microplastics arrive through the air and gradually build up in forest soils. According to the researchers, these tiny plastic particles first land on the leaves in the upper canopy.

"The microplastics from the atmosphere initially settle on the leaves of the tree crowns, which scientists refer to as the 'comb-out effect'," explains lead author Dr. Collin J. Weber from the Institute of Applied Geosciences at TU Darmstadt. "Then, in deciduous forests, the particles are transported to the forest soil by rain or the autumn leaf fall, for example."

How Plastic Particles Move Into the Soil

Once on the forest floor, natural processes take over. The breakdown of fallen leaves plays a key role in trapping and storing microplastics in the soil. The researchers found the highest concentrations in the top layer of leaf litter, where decomposition has just begun. However, significant amounts were also detected deeper underground.

This movement into lower soil layers is linked not only to the decomposition of organic material but also to biological activity, such as organisms that help break down leaves and redistribute particles.

Measuring Microplastics in Soil, Leaves, and Air

To better understand how microplastics accumulate, the research team collected samples from four forest sites east of Darmstadt in Germany. They analyzed soil, fallen leaves, and atmospheric deposition (the transport of substances from the Earth's atmosphere to the Earth's surface) using a newly developed method combined with spectroscopic techniques.

In addition, the scientists created a model to estimate how much microplastic has entered forests from the atmosphere since the 1950s. This helped them assess how much of the total pollution stored in forest soils can be traced back to airborne sources.

Forests as Indicators of Airborne Plastic Pollution

"Our results indicate that microplastics in forest soils originate primarily from atmospheric deposition and from leaves falling to the ground, known as litterfall. Other sources, on the other hand, have only a minor influence," explains Weber. "We conclude that forests are good indicators of atmospheric microplastic pollution and that a high concentration of microplastics in forest soils indicates a high diffuse input -- as opposed to direct input such as from fertilizers in agriculture -- of particles from the air into these ecosystems."

A New Environmental and Potential Health Concern

This research is the first to clearly show how forests become contaminated with microplastics and to directly connect that contamination to particles transported through the air. Until now, this pathway had not been thoroughly studied.

The findings provide an important foundation for evaluating the environmental risks of microplastics in both air and soil. "Forests are already threatened by climate change, and our findings suggest that microplastics could now pose an additional threat to forest ecosystems," says Weber. The results may also have implications for human health, as they underscore how microplastics travel globally through the atmosphere and may be present in the air we breathe.

The US has caused an eye-watering $10tn in global damages to the world over the past three decades through its vast planet-heating emissions, with a quarter of this economic pain inflicted upon itself, new research has found.

By being the largest carbon emitter in history, the US has caused greater harm to worldwide economic growth than any other country, ahead of China, now the world’s largest emitter that is responsible for $9tn in GDP damage since 1990, according to the findings of the paper.

About 25% of this GDP dampening has occurred in the US itself, although other countries have borne a heavy toll, with economic losses disproportionately felt in the poorest countries. Since 1990, US emissions have caused an estimated $500bn of economic damage to India and $330bn in damage to Brazil, the research finds.

“These are huge numbers,” acknowledged Marshall Burke, an environmental scientist at Stanford University who led the new work. Burke added that the US has “a lot of responsibility, our emissions have caused damage not only to ourselves, but pretty substantial damage in other parts of the world”.

The new study, published in Nature on Wednesday, attempts to attach dollar amounts to “loss and damage” – a term used to sum up the harm suffered by societies baked by dangerously rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

Developing countries have called for wealthier nations, which have emitted most of the greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution, to assist them financially to deal with loss and damage stemming from disastrous heatwaves, floods, droughts and crop failures worsened by escalating temperatures.

This damage is summed up by the new research, which calculates how much global heating has constrained GDP and assigned responsibility for this to countries based on their emissions since 1990. This metric does not include all consequences of rising temperatures but does show when economies are hurt by heat that wilts workers and strains public health systems.

“If you warm people up a little bit, we see very clear historical evidence, you grow a little bit less quickly,” said Burke. “If you accumulate those effects over 30 years, you just get a really large change by the end of 30 years. It’s like death by a thousand cuts. And you have people being harmed who did not cause the problem, and that feels just fundamentally unfair.”

Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, said that “past emissions add up fast, and the damages from those emissions add up faster still. Paying the full social cost of carbon for future CO₂ and other greenhouse gas emissions pays for itself many times over.”

The US has long resisted the idea of being held legally liable for its planet-heating pollution, which has helped push the world into climatic conditions that haven’t existed in all of human civilization.

Donald Trump has accelerated this abrogation, however, withdrawing the US from a loss and damage fund set to up aid vulnerable countries, as well as removing the country from global climate treaties, urging a “drill, baby, drill” approach to oil and gas extraction, and taking extraordinary measures to hobble domestic clean energy projects.

“I don’t think our numbers can force the Trump administration back to the sort of negotiating table around loss and damage, but it certainly says it should,” Burke said.

Frances Moore, an expert in the social costs of the climate crisis at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the research, said the study is “useful” but may still not fully account for all of the weight of damage suffered by poorer countries from a climate crisis they did not cause.

“Many economists would argue that the consequences for wellbeing of a very poor person losing a dollar are much larger than for a much richer person,” she said. “This differential effect of dollar-valued damages on wellbeing in rich as opposed to poor countries is not considered in the paper.”