Atmospheric Microplastic Transport & Deposition

Ocean and river plastic pollution get most of the attention, but a large share of microplastic fibers — shed from textiles, tires, and degraded litter — never touch water at all: they travel through the air. This simulator models that atmospheric pathway directly, releasing fibers from an urban source stack and carrying each one forward under a real physical balance of mean wind advection, turbulent eddy diffusion, and Stokes-law gravitational settling. Adjust wind speed, fiber diameter, turbulence intensity and emission rate to watch the deposition footprint stretch or collapse, and read live counts of airborne versus deposited fibers alongside the current settling velocity and mean deposit distance — a direct, size-dependent demonstration of why fine microplastic fibers turn up in rain, snow and dust hundreds of kilometers from any city.