‘Plastitar’ Is the Unholy Spawn of Oil Spills and Microplastics

Playa Grande is a beach with clear waters and fine sand on the east coast of Tenerife. If you go up one of the outcrops, you'll see that the rock is hotter and darker than the rest. It is indeed a new kind of pollution.

The scientists who discovered the horror called itplastitar. It's tar from oil spills mixed with the multicolored microplastics that are leaking into the ocean. Small bits of plastic waste are called microplastics.

More than half of Playa Grande's rock was covered in a noxious substance. The pollutant was found on the El Hierro and Lanzarote islands. The author of a new paper in the journal Science of the Total Environment said that the tar was full of mostly plastic. There is a new thing happening around the world not only in the Canary Islands.

There is a rock outcrop covered in plastitar. The rope on the bottom left is made mostly of plastic. The lentils in the top right photo are not lentils at all. These are the raw materials that are used to make plastic products. When they're shipped around the world, they spill in huge quantities. 500 million pounds of stuff enter the ocean every year.

The tar has many types of microplastics embedded in it, includingfragments and fibers in different colors. Millions of fibers break off when you wash a load of synthetic clothing and end up in the water. Larger plastic objects floating around the open ocean break into smaller pieces. Deonie Allen is a microplastics scientist at the University of Strathclyde who wasn't involved in the research. It is indeed our rubbish that is doing this.

Many, many smaller bits evaded detection when Hernndez-Borges and his colleagues looked for particles as small as 1 millimeter. Researchers have begun to test for small particles in microplastics. trillions of these plastic can be released into the sea.