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The Atlantic Is Awash With Far More Plastic Than Previously Thought, Study Finds

The Atlantic Is Awash With Far More Plastic Than Previously Thought, Study Finds

Scientists are trying to understand how much plastic people are pumping into the ocean and the length of time it sticks around. A study published this week says it may be more than earlier estimates.

By some measures, the plastic garbage that's floating around the surface of the water only accounts for approximately 1 percent of the plastic contamination that humans generate.

"If we're missing 99 percent of plastic that we thought we have put in, it has to be someplace," states Katsiaryna Pabortsava, a researcher at the National Oceanography Centre in the uk.

She and her colleagues set out to look for the lost plastic debris. Studies have discovered these bits, often called microplastics, deep in the Pacific Ocean and in the air above France's Pyrenees mountains.

But it's been unclear how much miniature plastic contamination is collecting in oceans.

Pabortsava and her team looked at three forms of microplastic pollution in the upper 200 meters of the Atlantic Ocean, also discovered evidence that a colossal quantity of plastic is dangling out below the surface of the water.



The results, released this week in the scientific journal Nature Communications, focus on three kinds of plastic that are used in common food and other product packaging.

The new study finds that the total number of plastic making its way into the Earth's oceans is probably higher than previous estimates imply. A previous study published in 2015 estimated that upwards of 12 million metric tons of plastic garbage made it to the seas in 2010 alone. Scientists only started attempting to measure how much vinyl is in the sea in the previous ten years.

That investigation was not supposed to present a thorough picture of plastic from the oceans -- it just appeared at municipal waste and did not account for plastic trash from ships or fish nets lost at sea. Nor did it estimate the length of time plastic pollution stays in the ocean.

"There are still huge uncertainties about how much plastic goes into the sea," Pabortsava states.

The new study adds to what's known but remains an incomplete image. It estimates that there's upwards of 21 million metric tons of three common kinds of little plastic contamination in just the top 200 meters of the Atlantic. It's a rough estimate -- that the investigators took samples at 12 locations up and down the Atlantic and extrapolated from there -- there could be even more plastic of different forms.

Microplastic from the sea comes from two main sources. Tiny spheres of plastic, called microbeads, were a frequent ingredient in exfoliating soaps sold in the U.S. before the federal government prohibited their use in personal care goods in 2015. The European Union did the same last year. But most miniature plastic pieces are remnants of bigger pieces of plastic broken down by waves and sunlight.

Microplastics under the surface of the ocean are bad news for the whole food chain. Small ocean-dwelling creatures eat them, and also the plastic makes its way into bigger fish and shellfish that humans consume.

It's difficult to imagine that eating tiny pieces of plastic is good for people, but the possible health effect of microplastics remains unknown. A 2018 study found that seafood is a important source of sustenance around the world which scientists must focus on figuring out how long microplastics live in the environment and how they influence human health.

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