We know that microplastics are literally everywhere.

They’re in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat – there is even evidence that microplastics first start invading human bodies in the womb.

So, I’m not sure how much of a surprise it is to learn they’re in the clouds overhead, too.

Environmental researchers from Penn State found evidence that microplastics are “seeding” clouds as they help in the formation of the ice crystals inside rain droplets.

The study used four different types of microplastics: low-density polyethylene (LDPE), polypropylene (PP), polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET). They put those microplastics into small droplets of water and allowed them to cool.

What they found was that the droplets that contained microplastics produced ice crystals that were significantly warmer than “clean” droplets. So, rain-producing ice crystals can form at warmer temperatures with microplastics inside of them.

This led the researchers to surmise that microplastics would also be responsible for changing weather patterns, too, and Miriam Freedman, lead author on the paper, says that is significant.

“Throughout the past two decades of research into microplastics, scientists have been finding that they’re everywhere, so this is another piece of that puzzle.”

The microplastic-laden rain could come less often, but it could be heavier when it does.

“In a polluted environment with many more aerosol particles, like microplastics, you are distributing the available water among many more aerosol particles, forming smaller droplets around each of those particles. When you have more droplets, you get less rain, but because droplets only rain once they get large enough, you collect more total water in the cloud before the droplets are large enough to fall and, as a result, you get heavier rainfall when it comes.”

This is just the most recent study to suggest there are microplastics in the clouds, but it is the first to suggest they could be negatively affect the weather.

“It’s now clear that we need to have a better understanding of how they’re interacting with our climate system, because we’ve been able to show that the process of cloud formation can be triggered by microplastics.”

They really are everywhere.

And I’m guessing we’re just starting to uncover how big of an impact they have on our everyday lives.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about the mysterious “pyramids” discovered in Antarctica. What are they?