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Scientists Discover Highest Concentration of Deep-Sea Microplastics to Date
Olivia Rosane Plastics & Pollution
Of the more than ten million tons of plastic that enter the world's oceans every year, less than one percent of it stays on the surface. Researchers at the University of Bremen, IFREMER in France, the universities of Manchester and Durham and the National Oceanography Centre in the UK set out to discover what happens to the remaining 99 percent, a University of Manchester press release explained.
They determined that it doesn't settle on the bottom evenly, but is instead pushed together with other sediments by deep-sea currents.
"Almost everybody has heard of the infamous ocean 'garbage patches' of floating plastic, but we were shocked at the high concentrations of microplastics we found in the deep seafloor," lead study author Dr. Ian Kane of the University of Manchester said in the press release. "We discovered that microplastics are not uniformly distributed across the study area; instead they are distributed by powerful seafloor currents which concentrate them in certain areas."
Read the full article here.
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