With so few people, one would think the Arctic would become a plastic-free zone, but a new study shows that’s not too far from the truth. Researchers studying the Arctic Ocean are finding plastic debris everywhere. According to Tatiana Schlossberg of The New York Times, Arctic waters seem like a dumping ground for plastic floating with ocean currents.
        Plastic was discovered in 2013 by an international team of researchers during a five-month trip around the world aboard the research vessel Tara. Along the way, they took sea water samples to monitor for plastic pollution. Although concentrations of plastics were generally low, they were located in one particular area in Greenland and in the north of the Barents Sea where concentrations were unusually high. They published their findings in the journal Science Advances.
        The plastic appears to be moving poleward along the thermohaline gyre, an oceanic “conveyor belt” current that carries water from the lower Atlantic Ocean toward the poles. “Greenland and the Barents Sea are dead ends in this polar pipeline,” lead study author Andrés Cozar Cabañas, a researcher at the University of Cadiz in Spain, said in a press release.
        The researchers estimate that the total amount of plastic in the region is hundreds of tons, consisting of hundreds of thousands of small fragments per square kilometer. The scale could be even larger, the researchers said, as plastic may have accumulated on the seafloor in the area.
       Eric van Sebille, co-author of the study, told Rachel van Sebille in The Verge: “While most of the Arctic is fine, there is Bullseye, there is this hotspot with very, very heavily polluted waters.”
       Although it is unlikely that the plastic will be dumped directly into the Barents Sea (an ice-cold body of water between Scandinavia and Russia), the condition of the plastic found suggests that it has been in the ocean for some time.
        “Fragments of plastic that may initially be inches or feet in size become brittle when exposed to sunlight, and then break down into smaller and smaller particles, eventually forming this millimeter-sized piece of plastic, which we call microplastic.” – Carlos Duarte , said study co-author Chris Mooney of The Washington Post. “This process takes from several years to decades. So the type of material we’re seeing suggests it entered the ocean several decades ago.”
        According to Schlossberg, 8 million tons of plastic enters the oceans every year, and today about 110 million tons of plastic accumulate in the world’s waters. While plastic waste in Arctic waters is less than one percent of the total, Duarte told Muni that the accumulation of plastic waste in the Arctic has only just begun. Decades of plastic from the eastern US and Europe are still on the way and will eventually end up in the Arctic.
        Researchers have identified several subtropical gyres in the world’s oceans where microplastics tend to accumulate. What is now worrying is that the Arctic will join this list. “This area is a dead end, ocean currents leave debris on the surface,” study co-author Maria-Luise Pedrotti said in a press release. “We may be witnessing the formation of yet another landfill on Earth without fully understanding the risks to local flora and fauna.”
        Although some pie-in-the-sky ideas to clean up ocean debris from plastic are currently being explored, most notably the Ocean Cleanup project, the researchers concluded in a press release that the best solution is to work harder to prevent the appearance of plastic first. In the ocean.
        Jason Daley is a Madison, Wisconsin-based writer specializing in natural history, science, travel, and the environment. His work has been published in Discover, Popular Science, Outside, Men’s Journal and other magazines.
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