Humans have filled the pristine Arctic Ocean with 300 billion pieces of floating plastic
Source: Portland Press Herald
Drifts of floating plastic that humans have dumped into the worlds 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 worlds oceans.
The researchers say this is just the beginning of the plastic migration to Arctic waters.
Its 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 studys 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.
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Read more: http://www.pressherald.com/2017/04/19/humans-have-filled-the-pristine-arctic-ocean-with-300-billion-pieces-of-floating-plastic/
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)Snackshack
(2,541 posts)There are 4 other Oceans...
DK504
(3,847 posts)then they have organ failure becasue they can't process this food. They are unable to procreate to keep the ocena alive and the oceans die. Then we die.
But there's no climate change ... ther's no proof. I'd like to shove plactic bags down their troats and see how well they can function.
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)oldcynic
(385 posts)Heard that (on Sci-Fri?) years ago. Because they knew then it was already too late.