Legacy of the Anthropocene:
Oceans filled with garbage
The pristine Arctic has become a garbage dump for 300 billion pieces of plastic
'Dead end for floating plastics': Plastic waste migrates to Arctic waters
Researchers say this is just the beginning of tiny pieces of plastic migrating to the Arctic waters.
Drifts of floating plastic that humans have dumped into the world’s oceans are flowing into the pristine waters of the Arctic as a result of a powerful system of currents that deposits waste in the icy seas east of Greenland and north of Scandinavia.
In 2013, as part of a seven-month circumnavigation of the Arctic Ocean, scientists aboard the research vessel Tara documented a profusion of tiny pieces of plastic in the Greenland and Barents seas, where the final limb of the Gulf Stream system delivers Atlantic waters northward. The researchers dub this region the “dead end for floating plastics” after their long surf of the world’s oceans.
The researchers say this is just the beginning of the plastic migration to Arctic waters.
Fishing nets and ropes make up a lot of the mass of Great Pacific Garbage Patch
“It’s only been about 60 years since we started using plastic industrially, and the usage and the production has been increasing ever since,” said Carlos Duarte, one of the study’s co-authors and director of the Red Sea Research Center at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. “So, most of the plastic that we have disposed in the ocean is still now in transit to the Arctic.”
The results were published recently in the journal Science Advances. The study was led by Andrés Cózar of the University of Cádiz in Spain along with 11 other researchers from universities in eight nations: Denmark, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The researchers estimated that about 300 billion pieces of tiny plastic are suspended in these Arctic waters right now, although they said the amount could be higher. And they think there is even more plastic on the seafloor.
Here’s a map the researchers provided, showing the ocean circulation in the Atlantic and where that, in turn, has delivered plastic particles:
Locations and plastic concentrations of the sites sampled. The white areas show the extension of the polar ice cap in August 2013, and the green curves represent the North Atlantic Subtropical Ocean Gyres and the Global Thermohaline Circulation poleward branch. (Andres Cozar)
Several factors support the idea that the plastic entered these waters via ocean currents rather than local pollution. First, the Arctic has a very small population that is unlikely to directly contribute so much waste. Also, the aged and weathered state of the plastic, and the tiny size of the pieces found, suggested that it had traveled the seas for decades, breaking down along the way.
“The plastic pieces that may have been initially inches or feet in size, they have been brittled by exposure to the sun and then fragmented into increasingly smaller particles, and eventually led to this millimeter-size plastic that we call microplastic,” Duarte said. “That process takes years to decades. So the type of material that we’re seeing there has indications that it has entered the ocean decades ago.”
Finally, the study didn’t find much plastic in the rest of the Arctic ocean beyond the Greenland and Barents seas, also suggesting that currents were to blame. Instead the plastic had accumulated where the northward-flowing Atlantic waters plunge into the Arctic depths. Presumably, the plastic then lingers at the surface.
The Greenland and Barents seas contained 95 percent of the Arctic’s plastic, the research found (the ship sampled 42 sites across the Arctic Ocean). The Barents Sea happens to be a major fishery for cod, haddock, herring and other species. A key question will be how the plastic is affecting these animals.
Here’s a collage that the researchers provided showing the types of plastic they found:
Photo collage of plastic fragments found in the Arctic Ocean. Although plastic debris was scarce in most of the Arctic waters, it reached high concentrations in areas of the Greenland and Barents seas. (Andres Cozar)
The study’s results sent a troubling message to one researcher who has also focused on the consequences of plastic debris in the oceans and other waterways.
“Isn’t it kind of ironic that days before Earth Day there is more demonstrated proof of widespread contamination of our plastic waste in places that are so far from the human footprint and thus locations we consider to be pristine,” said Chelsea Rochman, a marine ecologist at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the study but praised it as “a great contribution to the field.”
The ocean circulation system in the Atlantic responsible for this plastic transport is part of a far larger “thermohaline” ocean system driven by the temperature and salt content of oceans. It is also often called an “overturning” circulation because cold, salty waters sink in the North Atlantic and travel back southward at deep ocean depths.
As humans now put 8 million tons of plastic in the ocean annually, learning how such currents affect the plastic’s global distribution is a key scientific focus. Researchers, including Duarte, previously found that plastic slowly travels the world’s oceans but tends to linger in five “gyres,” or circular ocean currents in the subtropical oceans in both the northern and southern hemispheres. One of those gyres is located in the Atlantic, which then feeds the Arctic.
Scientists noted that the vast majority of ocean plastic becomes lost before it reaches the Arctic. They aren’t sure where most of the plastic falls out and are researching to determine those locations. “The plastic that escapes those traps is the one that actually makes it into the Arctic,” Duarte said. “But when it enters the Arctic, there is no way out, it just stays there and is stuck there.”
Because it takes such a long time for plastic to travel across the world in ocean currents, the study concludes that the current waste is largely the work of North Americans and Europeans, who dumped it in the Atlantic. Waste from other parts of the world that dump huge volumes of plastic into the oceans is still in transit.
Rochman said she feared that as the Arctic becomes more accessible because of ice melt linked to climate change, more plastic could wash in. “As the ice melts, we may see increasing concentrations of plastic in the Arctic due to the opening of passageways for vessels and plastics in surface currents,” she said, “as well as plastics in the ice becoming free to float and interact with marine animals upon melting.”![]()
The SSV Robert C. Seamans carrying scientists through a portion of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Photo: Jonathan Waterman
A close look at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
When that plastic water bottle that you brought to basketball practice was empty, you probably recycled it. But lots of plastics don’t end up in the recycling bin. (Think deli containers and straws.)
So where do they go? One place is the Pacific Ocean, in an area that has been called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A team of scientists recently sailed through the patch and found lots of plastic — not floating water bottles but thousands of pieces, most of them no bigger than your fingernail, from plastic products. Scientists are studying the problem, but they say the solution isn’t just up to them. It’s up to you, too.
Counting tiny pieces of plastic collected in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Photo: Matt Ecklund/Sea Education Association
Plastic explosion
Plastics have become a big part of our lives in a short time. Your grandparents didn’t have resealable plastic sandwich bags in elementary school. Plastic soda bottles weren’t invented until the 1970s. Once these and other plastic containers became popular, they began filling landfills, or huge garbage dumps.
Many communities started recycling programs so the landfills wouldn’t become full so quickly. But lots of plastics don’t make it into the bins. The Environmental Protection Agency, the part of the government that studies recycling, reported that only 8 percent of plastic waste was recycled in 2010.
The rest doesn’t all go to landfills. A plastic bag can blow out of a trash can and into a creek, then float down to a river, then into the ocean. Twenty years ago, people started noticing that plastics were collecting in the North Pacific Gyre (pronounced “jire” — it rhymes with “tire”), a system of currents that swirl in a circle that stretches from California to Japan. Newspapers and magazines published photos of floating trash and nicknamed the area the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
The Sea Education Association (SEA), which has been studying oceans for 25 years, organized a trip last fall to study the plastics found on the Pacific Ocean surface and just below.
Matt Ecklund interviewing Emelia DeForce about her experience during a voyage to study the effects of plastics in ocean water on the natural environment. Photo: Jonathan Waterman
What does it look like?
“If you’re looking for the plastics [from the deck of a boat] . . . chances are you may not even see it,” said Emelia DeForce, chief scientist on the expedition. “Almost never will you find water bottles. That type of plastic actually sinks.”
But DeForce and 37 other scientists and crew members on the 134-foot SSV Robert C. Seamans found plenty of plastic. They collected some of it with fine-mesh nets, then counted the pieces using tweezers.
“The majority is between one and 10 millimeters,” said DeForce, 33.
“Over time, wind, rain and [ultraviolet] rays will break the plastics down.”
Between San Diego, California, and Honolulu, Hawaii, the crew found 69,566 pieces of plastic.
On one unusually calm day during the 36-day expedition, the crew hit the plastics jackpot. “You could see little mini veins of plastic just going through the ocean,” DeForce said. The crew dropped a net and towed it for a mile. “We got 23,000 pieces of plastic,” she said. “That was the extreme.”
Other times, they would collect just a few pieces of plastic.
Wind and ocean currents had a large effect on the number of plastic pieces that the crew found.
Nets used to capture thousands of tiny pieces of plastic, many not any bigger than your fingernail. Photo: Jonathan Waterman.
Along for the ride
When crew members pulled up the nets, they also found marine life — tiny crabs and gooseneck barnacles — attached to the plastic. Hilary Hoagland-Grey of Arlington, who studied marine science with SEA while in college in the 1980s, said she was especially interested in “the whole idea of little microcosms traveling across the ocean [on plastic].”
One of the crew’s unusual finds — a refrigerator — had lots of tiny creatures inside it, Hoagland-Grey said. But even small pieces of plastic had plankton attached.
SEA plans to study whether the plastics are affecting the tiny living creatures the crew collected, DeForce said.
But sea life is a main reason why scooping up all the plastic isn’t possible, she said.
“When people start to ask questions about what can we do about this . . . when you try to clean up the plastics, you’re cleaning up the regular marine life that’s there.”
What to do?
SEA aims to spread the word about its expedition in the hope that people will keep more trash from reaching the oceans.
“Plastic is very important to us as humans. . . . We need plastics in our lives,” DeForce said. But she and Hoagland-Grey said we also need to be more aware of how we use plastics.
“I would ask kids to look around them and ask how many plastic things did they use today and not put in the recycling bin,” said Hoagland-Grey, noting that most cities and counties don’t recycle all plastics.
So next time someone offers you a straw for your chocolate milk, try saying, “No, thanks.”
You might keep one more piece of plastic out of the landfills and out of the oceans.
Around the world people are doing what they can to draw attention to the plastics pollution crisis in our oceans. Here, an exhibit in Rizhao, China in 2018 made entirely of discarded plastic drink bottles.
WRITE: Keep your own plastics journal
SEE: How to eliminate the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
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SEE: How to eliminate the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
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