News
Monitoring Microplastics in Deep Sea Waters
Members of our group are in midst of analysis. Dr. Mateos-Cardénas is currently working on how cold-water corals are coping with microplastics.
Dr Alicia Mateos-Cardénas is an environmental scientist within the group. As part of her postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Marine Institute, she looks at the presence of microplastics in the Porcupine Bank Canyon.
The samples that she has are mostly water, so she filters them on 13 mm silver filters for analysis.
Recently , she has been working on automatising this process. As such, she is now analysing her samples on reflectance mode on our FTIR Spotlight 400.
This means that she can take her filtered sample straight to the FTIR which then, after four hours of imaging each filter, and a bit more time analysing the images, she can find out if any microplastics have been detected (see image below). Stay tuned to know more soon!
In the meantime, you can read a bit more about her project here.