Remote Mountainous Area Inevitably Becomes Temporal Sink for Microplastics Driven by Atmospheric Transport

Atmospheric transport drives the widespread distribution of microplastic (MP) in various ecosystems, posing a growing potential threat to environmental safety and human health. Understanding the source and fate of atmospheric MPs is thus crucial to constrain MP's widespread exposure. However, the source-sink dynamics of atmospheric MPs, especially in remote areas, are uncertain, and their transport routes have yet to be identified. Here, we conducted a 13-month monitoring of the atmospheric MPs in the uninhabited area of Mount Taibai, estimated the potential risk of MP exposure to the environment, and modeled the MP trajectory to analyze their transportation. We first found that as many as 15 polymer types of MPs, whose shapes mainly include fiber, fragments, films, and granules, maintained abundance (0.7 and 0.3 particle/m