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Does this article deserve some skepticism? Will fishing nets really melt like that? It looks like they took some oven waste and put it in the oven. If plastics were melting like this in nature, wouldn’t we have seen a lot of it, all over the warm parts of the planet, by now?

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I agree on the skepticism. The article says that these fishing nets just melted on the beach from high temperature, but there is no beach on earth that I've heard of where temperatures are hot enough to melt plastic. 56°C is the world record temperature, not hot enough.

The origin of these melted plastic blobs are what's interesting. People here treat the discovery as some kind of warning against pollution, but it's an oddity: something that has been found in only one place.

> 56°C is the world record temperature, not hot enough.

That sounds like air temperature. Surface temperature gets way hotter. It’s well known you can cook an egg on desert sand.

But how could it get hot enough to melt plastic in this beach, but nowhere else in the world?

I think you missed the part where the island is an active volcano.

Last vulcanic activity on the islands was 50.000 years ago.

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