The Australian national science agency, CSIRO (Hobart; www.csrio.au) has unveiled what it calls the first global estimate for the amount of microplastics – pieces less than 5mm in diameter – on the seafloor. The whopping 14 million tons of refuse “is more than double the amount of plastic pollution estimated to be on the ocean’s surface,” the agency said.
The study adds to the knowledge about the amount of plastics pollution in the oceans and the impact of plastic items, both large and small, according to CSIRO’s Justine Barret, who led the research “Plastic pollution that ends up in the ocean deteriorates and breaks down, ending up as microplastics”. The estimate for the total amount of microplastics on the world’s seafloor was based on samples collected using a robotic submarine in depths to 3000m at sites up to 380km offshore from South Australia, according to the agency, which noted that the amount of microplastics recorded was 25 times higher than previous deep-sea studies.
Denise Hardesty, the study’s co-author shared “Deep ocean is a sink for microplastics”. The number of microplastic fragments on the seafloor was generally higher in areas where there was also more floating rubbish, CSIRO noted.
Focusing on the Atlantic Ocean, the UK National Oceanography Centre) in August 2020 published a similar study on microplastics in the marine environment. The NOC researchers estimate the amount of polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene microplastics alone in the Atlantic Ocean could be about 200 million tons
Source: Plasteurope.com
