The 'Eerie' Great Lake: Erie "Most Debris-Ridden of the Great Lakes"

Lake Erie doesn't glow in the dark, but today's Atlantic makes me worry.

From The Atlantic:

Lorena Rios-Mendoza, an oceanographer at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, is one of the scientists who've plunged the polluted depths of American lakes. Her team recently sampled sections of Lake Erie – which can't seem to catch a break these days, what with its mercury infection and rashes of poisonous algae – and discovered that the water's been invaded by great quantities of microplastics mostly smaller than grains of rice. Specifically, they measured concentrations between 1,500 and 1.7 million particles per square mile, which is 24 percent greater than what they found in the Atlantic Ocean's debris field.

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This survey comes on the heels of another effort by researchers at the State University of New York, who found that Erie was the most debris-ridden of the Great Lakes. (Lesser-populated areas around Superior and Huron had less plastic pollution.) One of the scientists in that project noted that the material seems custom-built to stay off the public's radar: “People became aware of plastics in the oceans and waters in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the great Pacific garbage patch. But from far away, bits of plastic look just like the water. So it’s not so noticeable or recognized in the greater topic of plastics in the environment.”