Despite its waters being the clearest they’ve been in 40 years, Lake Tahoe is brimming with microplastics, according to a new paper published this month in the journal Nature. The alpine lake, which straddles the border between Nevada and California, contains the third-highest amount of microplastics among 38 freshwater reservoirs and lakes around the globe, the researchers found. Lake Tahoe is so full of microplastics that their concentration in its waters—5.4 plastic particles per cubic meter—is greater than the concentrations measured near some of the huge garbage patches swirling in the world’s oceans.

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