As Hurricane Larry lashed Newfoundland in 2021, university students from Halifax headed to a rural area in its track to find out whether the ocean might whip microplastics up into the atmosphere then transport them by air to otherwise pristine communities.
The results, you could say, blew their socks off.
“It was such, like, an astonishing result that we weren’t really expecting,” said Anna Ryan, a Dalhousie University environmental science masters student and the study’s lead researcher.
To test their theory, the 24-year-old and another student set out a large glass cylinder — essentially trying to collect air — near Saint Michaels, a community of less than 300 on Newfoundland’s Avalon
