Plastic trash is now so ubiquitous that researchers have found hundreds of tons of it floating in the Arctic Ocean. It may not sound like much, but it鈥檚 a surprising amount given the area鈥檚 sparse population. The researchers who measured the plastic debris in the waters near the north pole described it as 鈥渨idespread and abundant,鈥� according to a聽study last month in the journal in Science Advances.
鈥淲e already knew that the marine plastic pollution was high at tropical and temperate latitudes,鈥� said study leader Andr茅s C贸zar, an ecologist at the University of Cadiz in Spain. 鈥淣ow, we also know that the plastic waste is extending up to the poles.鈥�
C贸zar and his colleagues estimated that 63% of the ice-free Arctic Ocean is 鈥渟lightly polluted鈥� with various types of plastic debris, including fishing line, microbeads and fragments of plastic products. Of the plastic trash that makes it to the Arctic, 95% of the plastic 鈥渄ead ends鈥� in either the Greenland Sea or the Barents Sea, north of Scandinavia.
Although the world鈥檚 other ocean 鈥済arbage patches鈥� are significantly larger than the plastic accumulation in the Arctic, the average concentrations of plastic found there were comparable to those found in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans.
In a 2014聽study, C贸zar and his team estimated those oceans contain 10,000 to 35,000 tons of plastic pollution, which almost never fully decomposes on its own. Their latest findings suggest 3% of that global total is floating in the Arctic.
In 2013, researchers aboard the聽Tara Oceans expedition who were working with C贸zar sampled 42 sites of ice-free ocean around the Arctic Circle. Using mesh nets, they skimmed for bits of plastic floating on the surface and for debris suspended in the ocean depths.
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