The stakes are far higher than one snowy field site might suggest. Mixed-phase clouds, in which supercooled liquid droplets and ice crystals coexist between 0 and minus 40 degrees Celsius, dominate the mid- and high-latitudes and exert a powerful influence on Earth’s radiative balance and precipitation. At high latitudes, where ice-albedo feedbacks and polar warming amplification are strongest, these clouds play an outsized role in the climate system. Yet their behavior hinges on ice-nucleating particles, or INPs, which are astonishingly scarce: for much of the heterogeneous freezing spectrum, they represent as little as one in a million of all atmospheric particles. Predicting their occurrence and abundance remains one of the great uncertainties in climate modeling, which is why the Hyytiälä team turned to an unconventional ally in their quest.

Between February and June 2018, the researchers deployed two continuous-flow diffusion chambers, the Portable Ice Nucleation Chamber known as PINC and its upgraded successor PINCii, to sample ambient air with unprecedented temporal resolution. Each instrument operated in a repeating cycle of five minutes of particle-free background measurement followed by fifteen minutes of ambient sampling, yielding one INP concentration data point every twenty minutes. PINC ran from 19 February to 2 April at a lamina temperature of minus 31 degrees Celsius, while PINCii took over from 22 April to 10 June at minus 32 degrees, both at a relative humidity with respect to water of 105 percent. The two chambers agreed within a factor of two during overlapping checks, and their sequential operation provided near-continuous high-frequency coverage across the dramatic seasonal transition from snow-covered winter to the awakening boreal spring.

The real innovation lay in pairing these measurements with the staggering observational infrastructure of SMEAR II, a station embedded in the Integrated Carbon Observation System, the Aerosol, Clouds and Trace Gases Research Infrastructure, and the Swedish Infrastructure for Ecosystem Science. The team interrogated 509 individually monitored variables spanning meteorology, radiation, soil conditions, aerosol physics, and trace gas chemistry. After quality screening that removed variables plagued by missing values, constant readings, and redundant duplicates, 84 parameters survived for analysis. All were harmonized to a common twenty-minute time base, creating a multidimensional dataset against which the INP measurements could be tested for hidden structure.

The machine-learning toolkit included random forest and decision tree models for feature importance ranking, alongside principal component analysis and K-means clustering for dimensionality reduction and pattern exploration. Crucially, the authors emphasize that these were exploratory tools for hypothesis generation rather than predictive modeling; no train-test splits or cross-validation were performed. To guard against statistical flukes, the random forest analysis was repeated under 50 independent random seeds, and the top-ranked variables remained stable across all of them. When many variables are screened simultaneously, the probability of finding spurious correlations rises sharply, and the researchers are explicit that their identified associations require independent validation before any causal claims can be made.

The rankings that emerged were revealing. The six highest-ranked predictors included nitrate aerosol mass measured by an aerosol mass spectrometer, the number concentration of particles between 250 and 1000 nanometers, fluorescent biological aerosol particle counts from a Wideband Integrated Bioaerosol Sensor, gas-phase acetone concentrations, cloud condensation nuclei at low supersaturation, and the time air masses had spent over land according to back-trajectory analysis. Fluorescent particles, detected through dual ultraviolet excitation, serve as tracers for primary biological aerosol, a well-studied INP source in forest environments. Surprisingly, indicators of black carbon also ranked highly, despite laboratory evidence that fresh soot is a poor ice nucleator, though atmospheric ageing, oxidation, and organic coating may enhance its ice activity, and a previous study at the same site independently reported short-timescale correlations between black carbon and INPs.

The seasonal split proved to be the study’s most striking finding. The winter measurements from PINC showed no meaningful correlation with any of the 84 examined variables; the fitted exponents in simple power-law relationships collapsed to near zero, meaning predicted concentrations were essentially flat regardless of what the environment was doing. In contrast, the spring and summer data from PINCii responded to ambient aerosol properties, with fluorescent particle concentration and nitrate mass both yielding moderate predictive skill, achieving adjusted R-squared values of roughly 0.5. The authors suggest that a local biogenic contribution, swelling as the ecosystem emerged from winter, augments a transported background aerosol during the growing season, making local proxies genuinely informative only in that regime.

Equally telling was the failure of established parameterizations. Widely used formulations from DeMott and colleagues and from Tobo and colleagues, which predict INP concentrations from temperature and the abundance of particles larger than half a micron, produced negative coefficients of determination against the Hyytiälä data, meaning they performed worse than simply guessing the observational mean. The Tobo parameterization, calibrated in a temperate North American forest where large particles are predominantly primary biological aerosol, systematically overpredicted INPs at the boreal site, partly because frequent new particle formation events there grow secondary organic aerosol into the relevant size range without adding ice-active particles. The team also found the INP concentration distributions to be broadly log-normal, a signature of random dilution and mixing that points to long-range transport from diverse, distant sources as the dominant winter supply mechanism, a conclusion echoing earlier work at the same station.

The deeper lesson is philosophical as much as technical. Correlation, even when machine-assisted and replicated across dozens of random seeds, does not illuminate causation, particularly when the target of interest is a vanishingly small fraction of the total aerosol and its identity remains undetermined without single-particle analysis of ice crystal residuals. The authors argue that the very question of why local measurements cannot predict INPs is itself scientifically valuable, because it constrains the problem space and redirects the field toward approaches that explicitly account for air mass history. They propose that future campaigns pair high-frequency INP measurements with source-apportionment tools such as back-trajectory analysis, receptor modeling, and, where possible, single-particle ice residual analysis, and point to efforts like the ACTRIS cloud in-situ initiative as platforms for such integrated studies.

For climate modelers, the message is clear: site-specific parameterizations rooted in local biogenic and chemical proxies, such as fluorescent particle concentrations and nitrate aerosol mass, offer the most promising path forward for boreal environments during the growing season, while winter INP populations in southern Finland appear governed by processes far beyond the forest. As the Arctic warms and mixed-phase clouds shift the energy balance of the high latitudes, understanding where ice-forming particles come from, and accepting that some of the answers lie hundreds or thousands of kilometers upwind, may prove essential to forecasting the future of the frozen North.

Subject of Research: Ice-nucleating particle concentrations and machine-learning variable screening in a boreal forest environment

Article Title: Exploring ice nucleation particle concentrations in a boreal environment: limits of machine-learning-assisted variable screening

Article References: Wu, Y., Brasseur, Z., Castarède, D., Heikkilä, P., Keskinen, J., Möhler, O., Kulmala, M., Petäjä, T., Thomson, E. S., & Duplissy, J. (2026). Exploring ice nucleation particle concentrations in a boreal environment: limits of machine-learning-assisted variable screening. Aerosol Research, 4(2), 293-309. https://doi.org/10.5194/ar-4-293-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/ar-4-293-2026

Keywords: ice-nucleating particles, mixed-phase clouds, boreal forest, SMEAR II, machine learning, random forest, aerosol chemistry, fluorescent bioaerosol, long-range transport, cloud parameterization, HyICE-2018, climate modeling

The research, led by Sami Harni of the Finnish Meteorological Institute and colleagues from Tampere University, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, and the Helsinki Region Environmental Services Authority, was conducted in an unoccupied, mechanically ventilated building located in the immediate vicinity of Helsinki-Vantaa International Airport, one of the busiest aviation hubs in Northern Europe. The team equipped the building with a clever switching valve system that alternated sampling every fifteen minutes between the building’s air intake, upstream of its filtration system, and the exhaust air vent. This design allowed near-simultaneous measurement of outdoor and indoor pollutant concentrations, dramatically reducing the uncertainty that plagues studies relying on separate instruments placed at different times and locations.

The measurement campaign ran from February 13 to February 27, 2025, and fortune smiled on the researchers: a strong long-range transport episode swept into the region during the study window. These events occur when weather systems carry polluted air masses from distant industrial regions across national borders, loading the atmosphere with sulfate, nitrate, and other secondary pollutants that formed far from where they are eventually deposited. Having both a normal baseline period and a pronounced transport event within a single campaign gave the team a rare natural experiment for testing how the chemical character of outdoor air changes the way pollution penetrates indoors.

The instrument suite was comprehensive. The researchers measured the chemical composition of aerosol particles using a soot-particle aerosol mass spectrometer, quantified black carbon with wavelength-dependent light absorption, and captured particle number concentrations, particle mass, and full size distributions. This combination matters because different pollutants behave very differently when air passes through a ventilation system. Large particles are efficiently removed by filters and deposit on surfaces, while ultrafine particles, those smaller than about 100 nanometers, are notoriously difficult to capture and can slip through filtration media that appears effective on paper.

One of the clearest findings concerned the airport itself. The team found that the nearby airport had a large effect on particle number concentrations but almost no effect on particle mass or black carbon concentrations. This pattern is characteristic of aircraft and airport operations, which emit enormous quantities of tiny ultrafine particles during taxiing, takeoff, and idling, particles so small that they contribute negligibly to total mass even while dominating the count of individual particles. It is a striking illustration of why mass-based air quality metrics alone can miss important exposure risks near airports: a cubic meter of air can pass a mass test while carrying millions of nanoscale particles that penetrate deep into human lungs.

Chemically, the story indoors and outdoors diverged in an unexpected way. Organic matter was the most abundant component of aerosol particles both inside and outside the building, which is typical for European winter aerosol. But the second-place finisher differed by environment. Outdoors, nitrate took second position, reflecting the contribution of nitrogen oxides transformed into particulate form during cold winter conditions. Indoors, however, sulfate outranked nitrate. The researchers suggest that nitrate’s poor showing indoors may stem from its semi-volatile nature: as particles are transported through the ventilation system and warmed, ammonium nitrate can evaporate back into gas, effectively stripping it from the particle phase before it reaches the indoor environment. The lowest indoor-to-outdoor ratio recorded in the study, 0.20 plus or minus 0.08, was observed for nitrate during the long-range transport period, consistent with this evaporation hypothesis.

Most indoor-to-outdoor ratios remained stable between the normal and long-range transport conditions, but there were telling exceptions. Particulate matter and black carbon showed higher indoor-to-outdoor ratios during normal conditions, while particle number concentration behaved in the opposite way, with notably higher ratios during the transport episode. The most likely explanation lies in particle size. During long-range transport, the geometric mean diameter of the particles increases, and larger particles are both more effectively captured by the building’s filtration system and more prone to deposition. Smaller particles, by contrast, penetrate more readily, so when the outdoor aerosol shifts toward smaller sizes, the indoor fraction rises even if the filters remain unchanged.

Perhaps the most sobering result involved black carbon, the sooty combustion residue linked to cardiovascular and respiratory disease. Under long-range transport conditions, indoor black carbon concentrations rose to levels comparable to those measured at street canyon sites in Finland, locations where pedestrians walk alongside dense urban traffic. In other words, a building sitting well away from any road, protected by mechanical ventilation and filtration, can still accumulate indoor soot at urban street-level concentrations simply because the regional air mass itself became polluted. The study highlights the significance of the intake filtration system in managing indoor pollutant concentrations, but it also makes clear that no filter is a perfect shield when the outdoor burden grows severe enough.

The work, published as a preprint in Aerosol Research and currently under peer review, comes with appropriate scientific caveats. An independent referee commended the dataset as valuable while recommending clarifications on several methodological points, including the representativeness of sampling from the exhaust duct, the treatment of transition periods in the alternating sampling scheme, and the distinction between filtered supply air and uncontrolled infiltration through the building envelope. The referee also noted that the wind sector associated with elevated particle counts is not unique to the airport and may include roads and other local sources, and that the study’s conclusions should be framed as a case study of one building, one winter campaign, and one ventilation configuration rather than a universal rule for buildings near airports.

Those caveats do little to diminish the broader significance of the findings. As aviation grows and urban development pushes housing closer to airport corridors, understanding which pollutants cross the threshold of a well-ventilated building becomes a matter of public health, not just building science. This study shows that the threat is not uniform: mass-based metrics may look reassuring while particle counts tell a different story, and a pollution event occurring hundreds of kilometers away can quietly raise the soot load inside a Finnish office to street-canyon levels. For building engineers, the message is that filtration effectiveness must be evaluated against particle number and composition, not mass alone. For regulators, it is that indoor exposure near airports cannot be inferred from outdoor monitoring stations. And for the rest of us, it is a reminder that the air we breathe indoors is never fully our own; it carries the chemical fingerprints of distant smokestacks, busy roads, and runways, filtered but never entirely erased.

Subject of Research: Indoor and outdoor aerosol chemical composition and particle penetration in a mechanically ventilated building near an international airport

Article Title: Chemical composition of indoor and outdoor particles in a building near an international airport: Influence of local and long-range transported air pollution

Article References: Harni, S. D., Li, D., Silvonen, V., Salo, L., Lepistö, T., Tykkä, T., Elsayed, M., Barreira, L., Saarikoski, S., Kulmala, I., Niemi, J. V., Hellén, H., Säämänen, A., Rönkkö, T., & Timonen, H. (2026). Chemical composition of indoor and outdoor particles in a building near an international airport: Influence of local and long-range transported air pollution. https://doi.org/10.5194/ar-2026-32

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/ar-2026-32

Keywords: indoor air quality, aerosol particles, airport emissions, ultrafine particles, black carbon, long-range transport, ventilation filtration, particle number concentration, nitrate, sulfate, Helsinki-Vantaa airport, aerosol mass spectrometry

At the most basic level, atmospheric microplastics are plastic particles smaller than five millimeters that have become suspended in air, with fibers and fragments dominating the observed morphologies. The review identifies three primary engines of emission: the release of fibers from textiles, the progressive degradation of larger plastic debris under sunlight and mechanical stress, and direct industrial emissions. Polymer compositions vary markedly by region, reflecting local economies and land use, so the plastic signature of a coastal textile hub differs from that of a desert agricultural region or a dense urban core. Photoaging studies cited in the review show that humidity itself plays a mechanistic role in how plastics break down in air, with water molecules influencing the oxidation processes that fragment particles into ever smaller sizes.

One of the review’s most consequential technical findings concerns how scientists measure this pollution. The authors report a systematic discrepancy of one to two orders of magnitude between active sampling, which draws air through a pump and filter, and passive sampling, which relies on particles settling onto collection surfaces. That gap means the two most common measurement approaches are not simply interchangeable, and comparisons across studies must account for methodology. The review also highlights persistent weaknesses in standardization: sampling protocols, detection limits, and identification techniques vary widely across laboratories, and particles at the nanoscale remain largely beyond the reach of routine detection, even though surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy and machine-learning-assisted identification of individual nanoplastics represent promising recent advances.

Geographically, the 2021 to 2025 literature has pushed the frontier of microplastic science into some of the planet’s most remote environments. Studies documented microplastics in Antarctic snow and in bulk atmospheric deposition along coastal Victoria Land, on Mount Everest, and across the Tibetan Plateau, including urban, rural, and wildland settings. Transport mechanisms are now far better understood than they were five years ago. The East Asian summer monsoon has been shown to efficiently carry airborne microplastics onto the continent, typhoon events over the South China Sea enhanced atmospheric microplastic loads, and dust storms entrain plastic particles from potential source regions and loft them into long-range atmospheric circulation. Airborne concentrations fall off exponentially from megacity to open ocean, but the atmosphere clearly functions as a global conveyor for plastic debris.

Seasonal and meteorological drivers shape these distributions in consistent ways. Rainfall washes particles out of the atmosphere, producing measurable deposition pulses in urban waters, while dry seasons allow accumulation of suspended particles. Coastal and inland cities differ in their winter microplastic profiles, as demonstrated by comparative work in Beijing and Shanghai, and monsoon winds can carry plumes from landfills across coastal cities in India. Desert agricultural regions, karst wetlands in Guilin, the North China Plain, and peri-urban Patna have all yielded distinct deposition signatures tied to local climate, human activity, and land use. The review emphasizes that these patterns are regulated by an interplay of climate, emissions, and environmental parameters rather than by any single factor.

Indoor air, however, may be where human exposure concentrates most intensely. The review finds that indoor and outdoor concentrations are significantly influenced by ventilation conditions, localized point sources, and environmental parameters. Studies of indoor environments reveal striking hotspots: nail salons generate airborne plastic particles from cosmetic applications, subway stations in Istanbul carry their own microplastic loads, hospitals in Iran and India show measurable settled-dust contamination, and educational institutions in megacity Bangladesh are not exempt. Residential buildings in a Middle Eastern study showed seasonal differences in settleable microplastics between warm and cool months. Because people spend the majority of their time indoors, and because indoor sources such as synthetic textiles, furniture, and flooring continuously shed fibers, the indoor environment arguably represents the primary exposure arena for most of the global population.

The exposure pathway of greatest concern is inhalation. The review states that particles smaller than ten micrometers can readily penetrate respiratory barriers, and the toxicological literature has begun mapping what happens next. Researchers have isolated microplastics from the lower airways of European citizens, detected them in human lung tissue using micro-FTIR spectroscopy, and found them in the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid of Chinese children, with associations to age, city development level, and disease features. On the mechanistic front, laboratory studies elucidate key signaling pathways, including oxidative stress and inflammatory responses, that are activated when micro- and nanoplastics interact with lung tissue. Animal work has shown that polystyrene nanoplastics combined with benzo(a)pyrene can synergistically induce lung fibrosis and inflammation via relaxin signaling in mice, and comparative evaluations suggest that toxicity depends on both polymer type and particle size.

The health implications may extend well beyond the lungs. A landmark study in the New England Journal of Medicine found microplastics and nanoplastics within atheromas, the arterial plaques implicated in cardiovascular events, and patients with detectable plastic in their plaques faced elevated risks. A global systematic review has compiled molecular and cellular evidence linking these particles to diseases of the cardiovascular, nervous, urinary, digestive, and reproductive systems. The review also notes that plastics carry chemical additives, including plasticizers and other compounds that can migrate out of the polymer matrix, adding a chemical-exposure dimension on top of the physical particle burden. Hydrophobic organic contaminants can also hitchhike on microplastic surfaces, raising concerns about particles acting as vectors for other pollutants.

Despite the rapid growth of the field, the review is candid about its limitations. Method standardization remains incomplete, making cross-study comparisons difficult. Detection of nanoscale particles is still technically constrained, leaving a potentially important size fraction undercounted. And the long-term toxicological mechanisms of chronic, real-world exposure remain poorly understood, since most laboratory studies use short durations, high doses, and limited polymer types that may not reflect the heterogeneous particle mixture people actually inhale. The authors call for cross-regional, multi-media collaborative monitoring networks, the development of highly sensitive detection technologies, deeper investigation of transport, transformation, and health hazard mechanisms, and, ultimately, the establishment of health risk-based exposure limit standards, something that currently does not exist for airborne microplastics.

What makes this synthesis resonate is its timing. In just four years, atmospheric microplastic science has moved from proving the particles exist in air to quantifying their global transport, dissecting their cellular mechanisms, and finding them embedded in human organs. The review’s authors argue that targeted pollution prevention and control now requires this scientific foundation, from textile fiber capture and industrial emission regulation to indoor ventilation strategies. As deposition studies continue to reveal plastic falling with rain in cities from Mexico City to Jakarta, and as monsoons and dust storms redistribute the debris across continents, the atmosphere has been formally recognized as a major pathway in the planetary plastic cycle. The question is no longer whether we are breathing plastic, but how much, at what particle sizes, and with what cumulative consequences, and answering that question, the review concludes, will demand a coordinated global research effort on the scale of the problem itself.

Subject of Research: Atmospheric microplastics: their characteristics, sources, human exposure pathways, and health effects

Article Title: Characteristics, sources, exposure, and health effects of atmospheric microplastics: a review of advances from 2021 to 2025

Article References: Characteristics, sources, exposure, and health effects of atmospheric microplastics: a review of advances from 2021 to 2025. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-026-15998-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10661-026-15998-4

Keywords: atmospheric microplastics, air pollution, microplastics, human exposure, inhalation, indoor air quality, nanoplastics, toxicology, oxidative stress, long-range transport, Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, health risks

The study focused on the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, where waves from the Atlantic Ocean crash against an extensive shoreline and strong winds whip spray far inland. According to the researchers, this is close to a worst-case scenario for sea-spray-driven PFAS transport: abundant wind, crashing surf and a long coastline all combine to maximise the generation of marine aerosols. If the ocean were truly pumping significant quantities of forever chemicals into coastal environments through spray, the team reasoned, Newfoundland would be one of the places where the signal would be unmistakable. Senior author Cora Young, an atmospheric chemist and Guy Warwick Rogers Chair in York University’s Faculty of Science, said the location was chosen precisely because it offered the ideal conditions to detect such an effect.

We designed this study specifically to see if sea spray was contributing to a mobilization of PFAS in coastal regions and Newfoundland is a great place to do that, Young explained, noting that it is a marine location and very windy, so the team expected quite a lot of PFAS from sea spray. Instead, she said, the researchers were quite surprised that they did not see anything indicating sea spray was contributing to PFAS in the area. The finding directly contradicts the expectation, rooted in earlier modelling and laboratory work, that the ocean-to-land transfer of these chemicals through aerosols represents a significant and direct exposure pathway for people and ecosystems near the coast.

To test the hypothesis rigorously, the team moved beyond simulations and carried out on-the-ground field work. Lead author Daniel Persaud, a PhD student at York, together with Young and their collaborators, collected both wet and dry deposition samples at several locations stretching up to 30 kilometres from the eastern coast. Wet deposition refers to PFAS delivered by precipitation such as rain, while dry deposition captures the dust and particles, along with gases, that settle out of the atmosphere onto the ground. Measuring both pathways matters, because many studies record only one or the other, and the balance between them shapes how scientists estimate where forever chemicals ultimately land.

The sampling sites were forested watersheds within the Newfoundland and Labrador Boreal Ecosystem Latitudinal Transect, a network of study locations chosen because they are all influenced by marine aerosols and lie close to the ocean. Because the sites are windy and near the water, the researchers expected a strong marine-aerosol signal in their chemistry. To track it, they used sodium as a tracer of sea spray, since sodium is abundant in ocean-derived particles. Persaud said the measured PFAS showed little association with sodium, indicating that the forever chemicals found at the sites were not arriving with the salt spray from the Atlantic.

That does not mean the landscape was clean. The researchers did detect PFAS at every study site, but the pattern of compounds pointed to a different origin. They mostly found perfluoroalkyl acids, a subclass of PFAS that includes perfluoroalkyl carboxylic acids and perfluoroalkanesulfonic acids. These substances are not produced from local sources in Newfoundland. Instead, the evidence suggested they were the atmospheric breakdown products of PFAS precursor compounds that had been emitted elsewhere, transformed in the air during long-range transport, and then deposited on the island. In other words, the chemicals arrived from distant industrial and commercial centres, not from the waves at the shore.

The likely sources of those precursors lie elsewhere in Canada and the United States, and potentially even further afield. PFAS and their precursors are typically found in firefighting foams, non-stick materials and performance chemicals, and they are notorious for their ability to travel long distances through the atmosphere, reaching even the Arctic. Because perfluoroalkyl acids are extremely persistent and can bioaccumulate in living organisms, their continued deposition in remote regions raises ongoing environmental concerns. The new results do not make those concerns disappear; they simply redirect attention away from the ocean surface and back toward atmospheric transport of emissions from faraway sources.

The implications may extend well beyond eastern Canada. Young noted that Newfoundland offers something close to a perfect storm for sea-spray generation, with driving wind, crashing waves and an extensive coastline that together maximise the amount of aerosol produced. If sea spray were a major route for moving PFAS from ocean to land, it should have shown up there. According to Young, this sort of sea spray is really not a major source of global pollution according to the study. That conclusion, she suggested, amounts to good news: researchers had worried that PFAS could move from ocean to land and back again indefinitely, but the field evidence indicates the problem is not as large as feared.

One of the study’s most instructive findings concerned the role of dry deposition. The team measured both wet and dry deposition, but that combined approach is not universally practised, and their results underline how important it is to do so in order to understand the full impact of PFAS in the environment. Young said she still finds it surprising that dry deposition remains so important even in a place like Newfoundland, where rainfall is frequent. The observation suggests that in many other landscapes, from remote deserts to the Arctic, the settling of particle-bound and gaseous PFAS may be a larger contributor than precipitation alone would indicate, and that studies relying only on rain and snow could substantially underestimate total deposition.

Persaud said the distinction between wet and dry pathways helps researchers better predict where forever chemicals will be found as they move around the globe and where they will ultimately end up, benefiting not only his team but other researchers going forward. The work was a collaboration with scientists at Memorial University in St. John’s, where Young previously worked and collected samples, the Canadian Forest Service and Natural Resources Canada in Corner Brook, and the Aquatic Contaminants Research Division of Environment and Climate Change Canada in Burlington, Ontario. The paper, titled The Occurrence of Legacy Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) Deposited along a Latitudinal Transect in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, was published in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts under DOI 10.1039/D6EM00257A. For coastal residents wondering whether summer sea spray carries a hidden dose of forever chemicals, the answer from this windswept corner of Canada appears to be reassuring: the ocean, at least, is not the culprit it was made out to be.

Subject of Research: Atmospheric deposition of PFAS forever chemicals in coastal Newfoundland and the role of sea spray as a transport pathway

Article Title: Exposure to forever chemicals through sea spray may be overblown

Article References: Exposure to forever chemicals through sea spray may be overblown. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: PFAS, forever chemicals, sea spray, marine aerosols, Newfoundland and Labrador, atmospheric deposition, wet deposition, dry deposition, perfluoroalkyl acids, long-range transport, York University, environmental chemistry