The 5 Gyres team, (of which I serve as crew) just completed two successful crossings of the South Atlantic late last year and early this one, from South America to Africa and back, to find what we were afraid we would: plastic micro-fragments and macro-pollution such as buckets, laundry baskets, plungers, water bottles, plastic sheeting and large polypropylene fishing nets.
It may also dispense micro fragments that could irritate the eye.[1].
The composer Kohji Setoh, on his laptop, contributed jittery samples and micro-fragments of speech, then long patches of air escaping, followed by a climax of crashing dissonances.
Finally, stone micro-fragments were sampled from untreated and treated areas of both Candoglia and Crevoladossola marble blocks and analyzed by ESEM-EDX with the above reported instruments.
We thank Dr. Abel Ponce de León at the University of Minnesota for providing the micro-dissected BTAY DNA fragments, and Dr. Jon Oatley and Ms. Melissa Oatley at the Pennsylvania State University for providing partial RNA samples of the bovine testes for this study.
Exposure to waves and radiation from the sun can cause plastics to break down into micro-fragments, but scientists say those fragments are stable and durable enough to last for hundreds of thousands of years. .
In a letter addressed to Arsene Alexandre dated 1895, the painter wrote: Fig. 2 ATR-FTIR spectra of the micro-fragment #1 taken from overpainted area in the background blue and a casein reference sample.
The tissue micro-fragments were compacted as sediments under gravity for 60 minutes and the volume of the tissue fragments was noted.
The micro-fragment taken from the capital separated into two parts during sampling: ÆIN 1045_1 and ÆIN 1045_2.
Fig. 6 ATR-FTIR spectra of the micro-fragment #8 taken from the flaking red layer found in the red cloth and a wax reference sample.
Micro-fragments of the stone substrate were collected by means of a steel scalpel and were chosen in order to be representative of different substrate conditions.
