How Typhoons Spread Plastic Pollution: A Scientific Discovery

Tropical storms, such as typhoons, hurricanes, and cyclones, are among the Earth’s most powerful weather systems. They are also born over warm oceans now overwhelmed with our plastic waste. As a researcher in coastal China, I watched these immense storms and asked a simple, troubling question: could they be picking up this pollution and moving it?

To find out, my team and I conducted a study in Ningbo, China, a coastal city frequently hit by typhoons. We designed a simple but revealing experiment: We collected atmospheric depositions every 12 hours to capture the before, during, and after a typhoon phase, and analyze it carefully. We repeated this sampling over three different typhoons (Doksuri, Gaemi and Bebinca) to confirm our results. What we found was striking.

During calm pre-typhoon weather, a small, steady amount of microplastic dust settles from the air. But when a typhoon arrives, that amount spikes dramatically. At the peak of Typhoon Gaemi, we measured 12,722 microplastic particles per square meter per day, over 50 times the normal urban background level. This spike was directly tied to the storm’s intensity and disappeared as soon as the storm passed. The typhoon itself was clearly driving this pulse of pollution. The key question was: where did this plastic come from?

We had three main lines of evidence.

1. The type of plastic changed. Calm-day samples contained plastics common in cities. Typhoon samples, however, included dense plastics like PVC and PTFE. These plastics are typical of ocean sediments, not urban air. Their appearance during the storm pointed to a marine source.
2. The size of the plastic changed. Over 60% of the typhoon-carried particles were smaller than 280 micrometers. This size is important as research shows that bubbles bursting at the ocean surface a process greatly amplified by typhoon winds are most efficient at launching particles smaller than this size into the air.
3. The air came from the ocean. We tracked the wind. During the peak plastic fallout, the air had traveled directly from over the storm-churned sea.

Together, this evidence was consistent and clear across three different typhoons. The conclusion was inescapable: the storms were actively pulling microplastics from the ocean and depositing them on land.

How does this happen?

The process can be broken down into a sequence:

• The typhoon’s energy mixes the ocean, bringing up plastics from deeper water and sediments by processes such as vertical mixing or upwelling.
• At the turbulent surface, wave-breaking and bubble-bursting inject these plastics into the air as fine aerosols.
• The storm’s winds carry this aerosol plume inland.
• Finally, the typhoon’s heavy rain scrubs the plastic particles from the atmosphere, washing them onto the ground.

In short, a typhoon temporarily becomes a highly efficient machine for moving plastic from sea to land.

Why does this matter?

This discovery links two major global issues.

• For public health: The particles deposited are small enough to be inhaled, meaning typhoons can create acute spikes in airborne microplastic exposure for coastal populations.
• For the climate system: Climate change intensifies typhoons, stronger typhoons are more efficient pumps for ocean microplastics. Higher microplastics in the ocean can disrupt biogeochemical cycles, including the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon, potentially exacerbating warming.

Additionally, warmer waters also accelerate fragmentation of plastic waste into microplastics. Which means, more intense storms spreading more plastic, more widely. We are not just facing two separate problems. We are engineering a system where they amplify each other.

This means our approaches to these problems must also be linked. Managing plastic waste in coastal zones is not just about reducing litter, it is a direct form of climate adaptation and public health protection. Cleaning beaches and improving waste systems removes the material that future, stronger storms would otherwise spread. Improving the coastal stormwater systems to trap MPs washed down by typhoons would prevent them from entering aquatic environment.

The challenge is transboundary typhoons collect plastic from international waters. Solutions, therefore, require regional cooperation and a new, integrated way of thinking about environmental resilience.

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