More sea foam might be a good thing, a rare silver lining to increased ocean pollution.
More sea foam might be a good thing, a rare silver lining to increased ocean pollution.
From cloud formation to sea temperatures, sea foam plays many roles in the dynamic interactions that occur at the surface level of the world’s oceans.
In an article published this week in Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, researchers from ETH Zürich and The Ocean Cleanup, based in New Zealand, examined the specific impacts of microplastics on the geophysics of sea foam formation in the critical zone where water meets air in the top layer of the ocean.
“The surface microlayer is the first area of contact between the atmosphere and a water body, lake, or ocean,” author Peter Fischer said. “All exchanges of materials, whether gases, water, or particles, pass through the surface microlayer before they are distributed deeper into the water column or upper layers of the atmosphere through evaporation and cloud formation.”
Read more at American Institute of Physics
Photo Credit: ELG21 via Pixabay
