3583. U.S. Military Consumes More hydrocarbons than Most countries -- Massive Hidden Impact on Climate

By Lancaster University, Science Daily, June 20, 2019

Row after row of U.S. F-16 Fighting Falcons fills the airstrip in a show of force at Kunsan Air Base, South Korea

The US military's carbon footprint is enormous and must be confronted in order to have a substantial effect on battling global warming, experts argue.

Research by social scientists from Durham University and Lancaster University shows the US military is one of the largest climate polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more CO2e (carbon-dioxide equivalent) than most countries.

The majority of greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting routinely focuses on civilian energy use and fuel consumption, not on the US military. This new study, published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, calculates part of the US military's impact on climate change through critical analysis of its global logistical supply chains.

The research provides an independent public assessment of the US military's greenhouse gas emissions. It reports that if the US military were a nation state, it would be the 47th largest emitter of GHG in the world, if only taking into account the emission from fuel usage.

Report co-author Dr Patrick Bigger, of Lancaster University Environment Centre, said: "The US Military has long understood it is not immune from the potential consequences of climate change -- recognising it as a threat multiplier that can exacerbate other threats -- nor has it ignored its own contribution to the problem.

"Yet its climate policy is fundamentally contradictory -- confronting the effects of climate change while remaining the largest single institutional consumer of hydrocarbons in the world, a situation it is locked into for years to come because of its dependence on existing aircraft and warships for open-ended operations around the globe."

Despite the recent increase in attention, the US military's dependence on fossil fuels is unlikely to change. The US is continuing to pursue open-ended operations around the globe, with the life-cycles of existing military aircraft and warships locking them into hydrocarbons for years to come.

The research comes at a time when the US military is preparing for climate change through both its global supply networks and its security infrastructure. This study brings transparency to one of the world's largest institutional consumers of hydrocarbons at a time when the issue is a hot-button topic on the US Presidential campaign trail. Leading Democratic candidates, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren, are asking critical questions of the role of the US military in climate change and examining its plans for the future.

Co-author Dr Benjamin Neimark, Associate Director of the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business at Lancaster, said: "This research provides ample evidence to support recent calls by activist networks to include the US military in Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal and other international climate treaties."

Co-author Dr Oliver Belcher, of Durham University's Department of Geography, said: "Our research demonstrates that to account for the US military as a major climate actor, you must understand the logistical supply chain that makes its acquisition and consumption of hydrocarbon-based fuels possible.

"How do we account for the most far-reaching, sophisticated supply chains, and the largest climate polluter in history? While incremental changes can amount to radical effects in the long-run, there is no shortage of evidence that the climate is at a tipping point and more is needed."

The researchers' examination of the US military 'carbon boot-print' started with the US Defense Logistics Agency -- Energy (DLA-E), a powerful yet virtually unresearched sub-agency within the larger Defense Logistics Agency. It is the primary purchase-point for hydrocarbon-based fuels for the US Military, and a powerful actor in the global oil market, with the fuels it delivers powering everything from routine base operations in the USA to forward operating bases in Afghanistan.

"An important way to cool off the furnace of the climate emergency is to turn off vast sections of the military machine," added Dr Neimark. "This will have not only the immediate effect of reducing emissions in the here-and-now, but create a disincentive in developing new hydrocarbon infrastructure integral to US military operations."

Other key findings of the report include:

• In 2017 alone, the US military purchased about 269,230 barrels of oil a day and emitted more than 25,000 kt- CO2e by burning those fuels. In 2017 alone, the Air Force purchased $4.9 billion worth of fuel and the Navy $2.8 billion, followed by the Army at $947 million and Marines at $36 million.
• If the US military were a country, it would nestle between Peru and Portugal in the global league table of fuel purchasing, when comparing 2014 World Bank country liquid fuel consumption with 2015 US military liquid fuel consumption.
• For 2014, the scale of emissions is roughly equivalent to total -- not just fuel -- emissions from Romania. According to the DLA-E data obtained by the researchers, which includes GHG emissions from direct or stationary sources, indirect or mobile sources and electricity use, and other indirect, including upstream and downstream emissions.
• The Air Force is by far the largest emitter of GHG at more than 13,000 kt CO2e, almost double that of the US Navy's 7,800 kt CO2e. In addition to using the most polluting types of fuel, the Air Force and Navy are also the largest purchasers of fuel.

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Story Source:

Materials provided by Lancaster University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Oliver Belcher, Patrick Bigger, Ben Neimark, Cara Kennelly. Hidden carbon costs of the 'everywhere war': Logistics, geopolitical ecology, and the carbon boot-print of the US military. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2019; DOI: 10.1111/tran.12319

3582. Climate Change and Wars

By Michael Roberts, Michael Roberts Blog, April 9, 2022

The US military is one of the world's biggest polluter. Photo: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

As the ugly war in Ukraine drags on, with more lives lost and atrocities (apparently) committed, energy and food prices hit yet more highs.  The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the UN publishes a monthly global price index.  The FAO Food Price Index reached yet another record high of 159.3 points in March, up 12.6% from February.

FAO Food price index

Oil and gas prices are also near all-time high levels.  In Europe, gas prices hit a record €335 per megawatt hours, and at that level, it is now cheaper for some power stations to burn coal rather than gas even when the cost of carbon permits is taken into consideration.  Europe wants to follow NATO’s bidding and cut back on Russian energy imports.  The irony is that some countries, like Italy, say that will need to burn more coal, in order to burn less Russian gas.  The International Energy Agency (IEA) posed the dilemma in relation to global warming and energy needs, given the Ukraine war and the sanctions against Russia.  “The faster EU policy makers seek to move away from Russian gas supplies, the greater the potential implication, in terms of economic costs and near-term emissions,” the IEA said, in a report.

Can the circle be squared: ie getting more energy supply to reduce prices, while still trying to reduce fossil fuel production to lower greenhouse gas emissions?  “We are determined to limit [Vladimir] Putin’s capacity to finance his atrocious war,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, wrote on Twitter. And then went on to say: “The EU must get rid of its dependency on fossil fuels”. At first sight, these two aims might be compatible.  Cutting back on fossil fuel energy from Russia will reduce energy use and lower carbon emissions, no?  After all, clean energy, says Christian Lindner, finance minister of Germany, should be considered the “energy of freedom”. So the German government plans to cut its dependence on Russian energy imports by accelerating renewables and reaching 100% ‘clean power’ by 2035.  But in the same breath German Chancellor Olaf Scholz accepted that, in the short term, it has little choice but to continue buying gas and oil from Russia!

COP26 in Glasgow contained an agreement to draw down fossil fuel production, even though there was a fierce argument that broke out over whether coal should be “phased down” or “phased out”. COP26 president Alok Sharma. “Countries are turning their back on coal,” he said. “The end of coal is in sight.” And yet, even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine , far from declining, coal use globally surged to record levels this last winter, causing emissions to rise, while clean energy installations fell below the levels needed to reach climate targets.  In the US, coal-fired power generation was higher in 2021 under President Joe Biden than it was in 2019 under then president Donald Trump, who had positioned himself as the would-be saviour of America’s coal industry. In Europe, coal power rose 18 per cent in 2021, its first increase in almost a decade. Economist Dieter Helm, professor of energy policy at Oxford university, says the shift away from fossil fuels has rarely looked more complicated. “The energy transition was already in trouble — 80 per cent of the world’s energy is still from fossil fuels,” he said.  “I expect that in the short term, the US will increase oil and gas output and EU coal consumption could increase”.

This conflict of aims by ‘the West’ comes at a time when global warming and climate change are reaching a ‘now or never’ tipping point, where the Paris target to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5C cannot be met.  In presenting the latest IPCC report on climate change (which supposedly outlines ‘solutions’ to mitigate global warming and meet targets), UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres commented: “The facts are undeniable. This abdication of leadership (by governments) is criminal.”  By this he meant that the 198 countries which had gathered in Glasgow for the COP26 Climate Change Conference last November were failing to hit any of their (already inadequate) targets for emission reductions. So global temperatures look set to barrel past 1.5ºC degrees limit above 1850 industrial levels.  Instead, the world faces a 2.7C temperature rise on current climate plans, the UN warned.  Current pledges would reduce carbon emissions by only about 7.5% by 2030, far less than the 45% cut that scientists say is needed to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C.

And it’s not just reducing current emissions that is necessary, but also cutting back on the already accrued levels of carbon in the atmosphere. It’s a stock problem because many gases are long-lived. Nitrous oxide can stay in the atmosphere for 121 years, methane for 12 years. Carbon dioxide’s lifetime cannot be represented with a single value because the gas is not destroyed over time, but cycles through the ocean–atmosphere–land system. Some carbon dioxide will remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years and the melting of the glaciers could release into the atmosphere previously trapped carbon.

Hoesung Lee, chair of the IPCC, bluntly explained that: “human-induced climate change, including more frequent and intense extreme events, has caused widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people, beyond natural climate variability.”  While “some development and adaptation efforts have reduced vulnerability,” he continued, “the rise in weather and climate extremes has led to some irreversible impacts as natural and human systems are pushed beyond their ability to adapt.”  Co-chair of the IPCC working group, Hans-Otto Portner, spelt it out: “The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human well being and the health of the planet.  Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.”

Lee made it clear what he thought should be done immediately. “The time to stop the exploration of fossil fuels, which are destroying our planet, is now. Half measures are no longer an option,”  But just stopping fossil fuel exploration is precisely that – a half measure.  That’s because to meet the Paris agreement, the world would have to eliminate 53.5 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide each year for the next 30 years. 

The problem is that it is ‘the West’: the mature capitalist economies, that have built up the stock of dangerous carbon and other gases in the atmosphere over the last 100 years which are doing the least to solve the climate crisis.  About one-third of the current stock of greenhouse gases has been created by Europe and one-quarter by the US. Yes, China and India are the first- and third-largest emitters today. But measured in terms of emissions per head of population, they are around 40th and 140th, and measured in terms of their stock per capita, they are one-tenth of the level of Europe.  And ironically, the main contributors to carbon emissions stock benefit from global warming as these mature capitalist (imperialist) economies are mainly in cold climates.

The countries of the ‘global North’ (Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel and Japan) are responsible for 92% of total emissions that are causing climate breakdown.  Meanwhile, the Global South – the entire continents of Asia, Africa and Latin America – are responsible for only 8% of ‘excess emissions’. And the majority of these countries are still well within their fair shares of the emissions boundary, including India, Indonesia and Nigeria.  To make matters worse, the impacts of climate breakdown fall disproportionately on the countries of the global South, which suffer the vast majority of climate change-induced damages and mortality within their borders.  

ŵLancet report

 But a recent research paper in the journal Nature found that G20 countries spent$14tn on economic stimulus measures during 2020 and 2021 — but only 6 per cent of this was allocated to areas that would cut emissions. Investment bank Morgan Stanley reckons to achieve sufficient emissions reduction would cost about $50trn.  About $20 trillion of cumulative investments will be required to switch out of fossil fuels. Solar, wind,and hydro will require $14 trillion of investment to deliver 80% of global power by 2050 and electric vehicle take-up will require $11 trillion to build the factories and infrastructure and develop battery technology. Biofuels, like ethanol, could be important for future global transportation alongside hydrogen and could eventually spread to aircraft, but to develop this would require a further $2.7trillion of investment. Carbon capture and storage could play a critical part in the energy transition but a further $2.5 trillion is needed for development.  Compare the $50 trillion price tag to the barely $100 billion that it has taken six years for countries to scrounge together.

Yes, greenhouse gas emissions have been reduced in some countries and there are technical solutions available.  Alternative renewable energy costs have come down 85% over the last ten years. But coal production must be cut by 76% by 2030.  And oil/gas infrastructure projects must be stopped. The current flow of finance is dramatically insufficient to boost renewables and manage fossil fuel reduction. Funding for all this change is miniscule compared to the task. 

And a switch to ‘clean energy’ won’t be enough, especially as mining and refining alternative fuels and systems also require more fossil fuel energy.  All the batteries, solar panels and windmills in the world won’t lower fossil fuel demand in the near term. Internal combustion vehicles – commercial and passenger – use plenty of steel, but electric vehicles use a wider variety of more expensive metals. For example, the average internal combustion passenger vehicle uses less than 50 pounds of copper, whereas a Tesla uses about 180 pounds of copper wound up in its electric motors. Additionally, the batteries essential to electric vehicles rely on materials like lithium and nickel, which require intense electric and chemical outlays to process.  All this means more fossil fuel production to mine more metals.

I have discussed before why market solutions like carbon pricing and carbon taxes will not deliver the required reductions in emissions. Market solutions will not work because it is just not profitable for capital to invest in climate change mitigation: “Private investment in productive capital and infrastructure faces high upfront costs and significant uncertainties that cannot always be priced. Investments for the transition to a low-carbon economy are additionally exposed to important political risks, illiquidity and uncertain returns, depending on policy approaches to mitigation as well as unpredictable technological advances.” (IMF). To save the planet and all species who live on it cannot be achieved through market pricing mechanisms or even more clever technology.  Remember clever science gave us vaccines and medicines to save lives in the COVID pandemic, but it was capitalism and pro-capitalist governments that still allowed the pandemic to happen and were unable to stop around 20m ‘excess deaths’ globally.

To stop global warming, we don’t need just clever new technology, we need to phase out old fossil fuel technology.  And we need a global plan to steer investments into things society does need, like renewable energy, organic farming, public transportation, public water systems, ecological remediation, public health, quality schools and other currently unmet needs.  Such a plan could also equalize development the world over by shifting resources out of useless and harmful production in the North and into developing the South, building basic infrastructure, sanitation systems, public schools, health care.  At the same time, a global plan could aim to provide equivalent jobs for workers displaced by the retrenchment or closure of unnecessary or harmful industries.  But such a plan requires public ownership and control of fossil fuel companies and other key energy and food sectors.  Without that, there can be no plan.

As the war in Ukraine rages on, we should be reminded that the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases are the military.  The US military is world’s single largest consumer of oil, and as a result, one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters.  The Pentagon’s greenhouse gas emissions annually total over 59 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. If it were a nation state, the US military would be the 47th largest emitter in the world., with emissions larger than Portugal, Sweden or Denmark.

And the US military is expanding all the time to protect US interests in oil and fossil fuel resources around the world. The Cost of Wars Project found the total emissions from war-related activity in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria to be estimated at more than 400 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide alone.  Thus global warming and fossil fuel exploration, production and refining are inextricably linked by military spending. Wars and increased spending on arms are not just killing people and destroying lives and homes, but also adding to the climate disaster that is engulfing humanity globally.  World peace would not only save lives and livelihoods, but also contribute to saving the planet and nature.

3581. The People's CDC

By the undersigned, The Guarian, April 3, 2022

Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC. Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP

The new omicron variant, referred to as BA 2, is taking hold in the US. Anthony Fauci and others have said they don’t expect a new surge in the US, but BA.2 is causing devastating surges elsewhere, and the policies and behaviors we might use to prevent a surge in the US have been widely abandoned, in part thanks to the CDC’s new system for measuring and conveying Covid risk.

In late February, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) unveiled a new Covid-19 monitoring system based on what they call “Community Levels.” By downplaying the importance of Sars-CoV-2 transmission, the new system instantly turned what was a pandemic map still red from Omicron transmission to green – creating the false impression that the pandemic is over.

Released four days before the State of the Union, the new CDC measures and the narrative they created let President Biden claim victory over the virus via sleight of hand: a switch from standard reporting of community transmissions to measures of risk based largely on contentious hospital-based metrics. The previous guidelines called anything over 50 cases per 100,000 people “substantial or high.” Now, they say 200 cases per 100,000 is “low” as long as hospitalizations are also low.

The resulting shift from a red map to a green one reflected no real reduction in transmission risk. It was a resort to rhetoric: an effort to craft a success story that would explain away hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths and the continued threat the virus poses. 

These new guidelines are at odds with evidence-based and equitable public health practice in three fundamental ways.

First, they do not intend to prevent disease spread. By minimizing the importance of new cases, and focusing instead on hospitalizations–a lagging indicator–the revamped warning system delays action until surges are well underway and the consequences of severe disease and death are already in motion. Making matters worse, at-home tests are not recorded in the US, so the only “early indicator” in the risk level calculation grossly undercounts the true number of cases.

The justification for the shift is that the virus is mostly harmless– a claim which not only ignores that one million have already died in the US alone, but also completely erases the reality of Long Covid. Studies indicate that 10-30% of Covid infections deteriorate into multiple debilitating syndromes lasting months to years. Minimizing Covid’s risks to the public will only increase these harms in our communities.

Secondly, the new guidelines do more than inappropriately message safety; the guidelines shift the burden of responsibility onto vulnerable people. In place of clear, evidence-based guidance on masking for those facing greater risk, for example, the CDC simply advises individuals to consult with their local healthcare provider. This instruction assumes that providers are accessible, well informed, and willing to take on the personal liability for giving guidance around a potentially fatal virus that the CDC was once responsible for. In a country without healthcare for all, these assumptions are wrong.

Even before these changes, Biden and the CDC declared the US faced a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” – disregarding the risks faced by those of us living with chronic diseases and disabilities, including the immunocompromised; those with lower incomes and higher-risk jobs; members of indigenous, Black, and Latinx communities; the elderly; the pregnant; and children, especially under five years old.

These vulnerable populations have unjustly had too little access to vaccines, masks, testing, and clean air. Many faced employment practices forcing them into unsafe, in-person work, while those more privileged protected themselves by working and learning remotely. We’ve already seen the consequences of these inequities: disproportionate death and disability in structurally vulnerable communities. Now, by increasing transmissions, inequities will continue to multiply as the pandemic continues.

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Thirdly, the guidelines are blatantly political. The new recommendations aim to convince the public that this pandemic is over when it is not. They suggest we tolerate the nearly one million US dead, and too-quickly abandon measures that would keep that number from growing. They suggest we continue to isolate those with chronic illness and disability while the rest return to “normal” life. They suggest Long Covid isn’t the rapidly growing crisis that it is, especially for those fully vaccinated, despite documented risks of ongoing and sometimes disabling symptoms. They dismiss the near-inevitable emergence of new variants. They dismiss the urgency to vaccinate the rest of the world.

Before the new CDC guidelines, the vulnerable were moderately protected by local mask mandates, passing shelter-in-place recommendations, and general support for public health interventions aimed at collective well-being. There was at least some urgency around vaccination campaigns and occupational protections against the virus. There was recognition that Covid was still a threat.

Changing the metrics alone permitted jurisdictions across the US to retire mask mandates and people to retire their masks. As successful health campaigns are interrelated, efforts to vaccinate against Covid and improve ventilation in schools and at work have also lost steam. The shift from red to green reflects both major US parties turning the page on the virus as a political problem rather than a change in the reality of the pandemic. And the red to green shift also paved the way for the political class to wash their hands of would-be fights over Covid funding.

Some claim that the White House and the CDC are “following the science” and doing the best they can in these times. But if the goal is to prevent infection and suffering, the updated recommendations do not align with science or equity. It’s more accurate to say they’re following the money. They’ve put the desires of corporate America above the needs of our people, and especially our most vulnerable.

We need a CDC that prioritizes the health of the people, not the health of big business. We need a People’s CDC. And so we formed one.

We’re epidemiologists and physicians, artists and biologists. We’re children, parents, and grandparents. We’re living with Long Covid and losses of loved ones. We’ve come together with a common anger at our government’s disregard for social and public health responsibilities. Though many of us have just met, we inherit hundreds of years of resistance traditions.

We greet this work with humility, recognizing there are still many uncertainties about new variants, Long Covid, and the future of therapeutics. Yet we know enough to reject, with certainty, ineffectual public health policies based on individualistic approaches. And we are certain that there is another way - that collective action has always and can now create a new way forward in responding to Covid and other deadly pathogens.

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We’ve already put out a statement and recommendations about BA 2, a statement regarding the CDC’s new recommendations and we brought together a coalition of groups to create an equity-focused toolkit to help parents and teachers demand the best Covid protections in schools. We are in the midst of developing COVID “weather reports” on the state of the pandemic based on epidemiological data rather than what corporate America demands.

We demand a layered, collective, and equitable approach to the pandemic. We recognize that none are safe from contagious disease until we are all safe. It is with this understanding that we will continue to share the latest on the state of the pandemic, toolkits for action, and recommendations on what to do, developed for and together with community organizations. For it is only through collective power that we can create a new, more equitable world that can not only control outbreaks but also prevent them from emerging in the first place.

We hope you will join us.

Mindy Fullilove, MD, The New School

Zoey Thill, MD, MPH, MPP, Family Medicine Physician

Josh Garoon, PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Mary Jirmanus Saba, Independent Filmmaker

Lucky Tran, PhD, March for Science

Elaine A. Hills, PhD, Independent Public Health Scientist

Jeoffry B. Gordon, MD, MPH, California Physicians Alliance

Douglas Farrand, University of Orange

Dannie Ritchie, MD, MPH, Brown University, Community Health Innovations of Rhode Island

Kaliris Y. Salas-Ramirez, PhD, The City College of New York

Sam Friedman, PhD, NYU Grossman School of Medicine

Molly Rose Kaufman, University of Orange

Daniel Joseph Wiley, The HUUB

Robert G. Wallace, PhD, Pandemic Research for the People

Margeaux Simmons, PhD, University of Orange

Edgar Rivera Colon, PhD, USC Keck School of Medicine

• The People’s CDC is a collective of public health practitioners, scientists, healthcare workers, educators, advocates and people from all walks of life who care about reducing the harmful impacts of Covid-19. The People’s CDC is volunteer-run and independent of partisan political and corporate interests. A copy of the People’s CDC report on the change in the CDC’s Covid-19 guidelines can be found at peoplescdc.org.

3580. Microplastics and climate crisis

By Sabrina Imbler, The New York Times, April 3, 2022

Plastic waste washing up on a beach in Bali, Indonesia. Surface surveys have accounted for only about 1 percent of the ocean’s estimated plastic.Credit...Agung Parameswara/Getty Images

As long as there has been marine life, there has been marine snow — a ceaseless drizzle of death and waste sinking from the surface into the depths of the sea.

The snow begins as motes, which aggregate into dense, flocculent flakes that gradually sink and drift past the mouths (and mouth-like apparatuses) of scavengers farther down. But even marine snow that is devoured will most likely be snowfall once more; a squid’s guts are just a rest stop on this long passage to the deep.

Although the term may suggest wintry whites, marine snow is mostly brownish or grayish, comprising mostly dead things. For eons, the debris has contained the same things — flecks from plant and animal carcasses, feces, mucus, dust, microbes, viruses — and transported the ocean’s carbon to be stored on the seafloor. Increasingly, however, marine snowfall is being infiltrated by microplastics: fibers and fragments of polyamide, polyethylene and polyethylene terephthalate. And this fauxfall appears to be altering our planet’s ancient cooling process.

Every year, tens of millions of tons of plastic enter Earth’s oceans. Scientists initially assumed that the material was destined to float in garbage patches and gyres, but surface surveys have accounted for only about one percent of the ocean’s estimated plastic. A recent model found that 99.8 percent of plastic that entered the ocean since 1950 had sunk below the first few hundred feet of the ocean. Scientists have found 10,000 times more microplastics on the seafloor than in contaminated surface waters.

Marine snow, one of the primary pathways connecting the surface and the deep, appears to be helping the plastics sink. And scientists have only begun to untangle how these materials interfere with deep-sea food webs and the ocean’s natural carbon cycles.

“It’s not just that marine snow transports plastics or aggregates with plastic,” Luisa Galgani, a researcher at Florida Atlantic University, said. “It’s that they can help each other get to the deep ocean.”

The sunlit surface of the sea blooms with phytoplankton, zooplankton, algae, bacteria and other minuscule life, all feeding on sunbeams or one another. As these microbes metabolize, some produce polysaccharides that can form a sticky gel that attracts the lifeless bodies of tiny organisms, small shreds of larger carcasses, shells from foraminifera and pteropods, sand and microplastics, which stick together to form larger flakes. “They are the glue that keeps together all the components of marine snow,” Dr. Galgani said.

Marine snowflakes fall at different rates. Smaller ones have a more languid descent — “as slow as a meter a day,” said Anela Choy, a biological oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Bigger particles, such as dense fecal pellets, can sink quicker. “It just skyrockets to the bottom of the ocean,” said Tracy Mincer, a researcher at Florida Atlantic University.

Plastic in the ocean is constantly being degraded; even something as big and buoyant as a milk jug will eventually shed and splinter into microplastics. These plastics develop biofilms of distinct microbial communities — the “plastisphere,” said Linda Amaral-Zettler, a scientist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, who coined the term. “We sort of think about plastic as being inert,” Dr. Amaral-Zettler said. “Once it enters the environment, it’s rapidly colonized by microbes.”

Microplastics can host so many microbial hitchhikers that they counteract the natural buoyancy of the plastic, causing their raft to sink. But if the biofilms then degrade on the way down, the plastic could float back up, potentially leading to a yo-yoing purgatory of microplastics in the water column. Marine snow is anything but stable; as flakes free-fall into the abyss, they are constantly congealing and falling apart, rent by waves or predators.

“It’s not as simple as: Everything’s falling all the time,” said Adam Porter, a marine ecologist at the University of Exeter in England. “It’s a black box in the middle of the ocean, because we can’t stay down there long enough to work out what’s going on.”

To explore how marine snow and plastics are distributed in the water column, Dr. Mincer has begun to sample deeper waters with a dishwasher-size pump full of filters that dangles on a wire from a research boat. The filters are arranged from big mesh to small to filter out fish and plankton. Running these pumps for 10 hours at a stretch has revealed nylon fibers and other microplastics distributed throughout the water column below the South Atlantic subtropical gyre.

But even with a research boat and its expensive and unwieldy equipment, an individual piece of marine snow is not easily retrieved from deep water in the actual ocean. The pumps often disturb the snow and scatter fecal pellets. And the flakes alone offer little insight into how fast some snows are sinking, which is vital to understanding how long the plastics linger, yo-yo or sink in the water column before settling on the seafloor.

“Is it decades?” Dr. Mincer asked. “Is it hundreds of years? Then we can understand what we’re in here for, and what kind of problem this really is.”

To answer these questions, and work within a budget, some scientists have made and manipulated their own marine snow in the lab.

In Exeter, Dr. Porter collected buckets of seawater from a nearby estuary and loaded the water into continuously rolling bottles. He then sprinkled in microplastics, including polyethylene beads and polypropylene fibers. The constant churning, and a squirt of sticky hyaluronic acid, encouraged particles to collide and stick together into snow.

“We obviously don’t have 300 meters of a tube to make it sink,” Dr. Porter said. “By rolling it, what you’re doing is you’re creating a never-ending water column for the particles to fall through.”

After the bottles rolled for three days, he pipetted out the snow and analyzed the number of microplastics in each flake. His team found that every type of microplastic they tested aggregated into marine snow, and that microplastics such as polypropylene and polyethylene — normally too buoyant to sink on their own — readily sank once incorporated into marine snow. And all the marine snow contaminated with microplastics sank significantly faster than the natural marine snow.

Dr. Porter suggested that this potential change of the speed of the snow could have vast implications for how the ocean captures and stores carbon: Faster snowfalls could store more microplastics in the deep ocean, whereas slower snowfalls could make the plastic-laden particles more available to predators, potentially starving food webs deeper down. “The plastics are a diet pill for these animals,” said Karin Kvale, a carbon cycle scientist at GNS Science in New Zealand.

In experiments in Crete, with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research program, Dr. Galgani has tried mimicking marine snow on a larger scale. She dropped six mesocosms — huge bags that each contained nearly 800 gallons of seawater and recreated natural water movement — in a large pool. Under these conditions, marine snow formed. “In the field, you mostly make observations,” Dr. Galgani said. “You have so little space and a limited system. In the mesocosm, you are manipulating a natural system.”

Dr. Galgani mixed microplastics into three mesocosms in an attempt to “recreate a sea and maybe a future ocean where you can have a high concentration of plastic,” she said. The mesocosms laden with microplastics produced not just more marine snow but also more organic carbon, as the plastics offered more surfaces for microbes to colonize. All this could seed the deep ocean with even more carbon and alter the ocean’s biological pump, which helps regulate the climate.

“Of course, it’s a very, very big picture,” Dr. Galgani said. “But we have some signals that it can have an effect. Of course, it depends on how much plastic there is.”

To understand how microplastics might travel through deep-sea food webs, some scientists have turned to creatures for clues.

Every 24 hours, many species of marine organism embark on a synchronized migration up and down in the water column. “They do the equivalent of a marathon every day and night,” Dr. Choy said. Guilherme V.B. Ferreira, a researcher at the Rural Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil, wondered: “Is it possible they are transporting the plastics up and down?”

Dr. Ferreira and Anne Justino, a doctoral student at the same university, collected vampire squids and midwater squids from a patch of the tropical Atlantic. They found a plethora of plastics in both species: mostly fibers, but also fragments and beads.

This made sense for midwater squids, which migrate toward the surface at night to feed on fish and copepods that eat microplastics directly. But vampire squids, which live in deeper waters with fewer microplastics, had even higher levels of plastic, as well as foam, in their stomachs. The researchers hypothesize that the vampire squids’ primary diet of marine snow, especially meatier fecal pellets, may be funneling plastics into their bellies.

“It’s very concerning,” Ms. Justino said. Dr. Ferreira said: “They are one of the most vulnerable species for this anthropogenic influence.”

Ms. Justino has excavated fibers and beads from the digestive tracts of lanternfish, hatchetfish and other fish that migrate up and down in the mesopelagic, 650 to 3,300 feet down. Some microbial communities that settle on microplastics can bioluminesce, drawing in fish like a lure, said Dr. Mincer.

In the Monterey Bay Canyon, Dr. Choy wanted to understand if certain species of filter feeders were ingesting microplastics and transporting them into food webs in deeper water. “Marine snow is one of the major things that connects food webs across the ocean,” she said.

Dr. Choy zeroed in on the giant larvacean Bathochordaeus stygius. The larvacean resembles a tiny tadpole and lives inside a palatial bubble of mucus that can reach up to a meter long. “It’s worse than the grossest booger you’ve ever seen,” Dr. Choy said. When their snot-houses become clogged from feeding, the larvaceans move out and the heavy bubbles sink. Dr. Choy found that these palaces of mucus are crowded with microplastics, which are funneled to the deep along with all their carbon.

Giant larvaceans are found across the world’s oceans, but Dr. Choy emphasized that her work was focused on the Monterey Bay Canyon, which belongs to a network of marine protected areas and is not representative of other, more polluted seas. “It’s one deep bay on one coast of one country,” Dr. Choy said. “Scale up and think about how vast the ocean is, especially the deep water.”

Individual flakes of marine snow are small, but they add up. A model created by Dr. Kvale estimated that in 2010, the world’s oceans produced 340 quadrillion aggregates of marine snow, which could transport as many as 463,000 tons of microplastics to the seafloor each year.

Scientists are still exploring exactly how this plastic snow is sinking, but they do know for sure, Dr. Porter said, that “everything eventually sinks in the ocean.” Vampire squids will live and die and eventually become marine snow. But the microplastics that pass through them will remain, eventually settling on the seafloor in a stratigraphic layer that will mark our time on the planet long after humans are gone.