Two High Schoolers Tested The Water In a Popular National Park — Bring Back Proof of Microplastics
The theme for this year’s World Environment Day celebrations called attention to the ever-increasing problem of plastic pollution, per the UN Environment Programme. The polymer has seeped into the biggest oceans and the deepest of forests. While authorities are tackling the visible plastic problem, there remains one that is latent and invisible to the naked eye– microplastics. The awareness around microplastics still has a long way to go but two high schoolers from the San Francisco Bay Area are already on it as they sampled water from remote lakes at the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, an iconic national park known for its diverse ecosystem, as reported by Jackson Hole News & Guide.
In August 2024, Felix Ma, 17, and Tyler Lin Nicols, 16, traveled to the national park and collected water samples with a rental water pump to test the lake for microplastics. They sampled eight lakes without any adult supervision over five days and returned to California to test and analyze the lakewater. In their labs, they used a microscope and a spectrometer to hunt for microplastics. They found plastic particles in two of the eight water samples from the Teton lakes– Two Ocean Lake and Lake Solitude. “Most of the research on aquatic microplastics has been done in the oceans. And that’s definitely important, but it’s not the only part of the Earth that matters,” said Ma, now 18. A few weeks ago, they had run a test in Lake Tahoe.
The students were surprised to find that microplastics in the two remote lakes, while ones with high traffic and tourists, like Jackson Lake, came up as negative. Ma and Nicols' findings were a breakthrough considering the National Park Service rarely conducts sampling tests for microplastics. Simeon Cakey, a physical science branch chief for Grand Teton National Park, said the NPS does monitor the lakewaters for pH, alkalinity, conductivity, temperature, and pathogens. “We would actually have to overhaul our entire monitoring equipment because a lot of our monitoring equipment is major [high-density polyethylene] plastic,” added Caskey.
Meanwhile, Janine Brahney, a biogeochemist at Utah State University who studies pollution and climate change impacts on ecosystems, has been researching plastic pollution in wild and forested regions. In a 2020 study, she published findings after researching 12 wilderness areas in the western U.S. that uncovered 1,000 and 4,000 tonnes of plastic in the sample areas. To put it into perspective, the statistic is equivalent to up to 400 million water bottles over 193,000 square miles in the area. The locations included the Grand Canyon, Wind River Range, Craters of the Moon National Monument, and Rocky Mountain National Park, per the source.
Reflecting on that, Brahney said, “I don’t think you could sample anything and not find plastics anymore.” Indeed, a study published in the journal Science of the Total Environment in ScienceDirect revealed microplastics were found in human semen samples, characterized by Raman Microspectroscopy. Therefore, plastics or microplastics are as much of a health hazard to humans as it is to the environment. The presence of microplastics in human organs and fluids, often transferred through contaminated foods, is a great and growing concern as it has been linked to brain damage, reproductive impairment, and liver failure, per a study published in the journal Nature.