Forget the big dump of the Pacific, there is more plastic at the bottom of the sea

SAN FRANCISCO – The problem of plastic pollution in the ocean is even worse than feared. Tiny pieces of plastic – microplastic – do not float on the surface of the water but invade thousands of feet. Research released Thursday reveals that there is more microplastic at 1,000 feet than the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

"We did not expect that there would be four times more plastic floating in depth than on the surface," said Kyle Van Houtan, chief scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

He is one of the authors of the study published in this week's issue of Nature's Scientific Reports, which investigated the amount of plastic in the seabed.

Tons of plastic waste run down the rivers and the sea every day, fouling the surface and endangering marine life. It has long been thought that the greater part floated. But when the researchers looked at the depth of the surface, they found a small amount of broken pieces of plastic, smaller than the rice grains, where they looked.

The issue of plastic plastic waste has been at the center of public concern over the last decade, a concern that centered on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This is a huge amount of plastic waste floating halfway between California and Hawaii, brought together by ocean currents to create a gyre. This wave swirl concentrates floating waste in an area twice as large as Texas.

It is important to remember that the patch does not consist of large floating waste rafts, but rather an almost ubiquitous fog of tiny pieces of plastic floating in the water. See it more like a fog in the water than a bottle of bleach.

Scientists have discovered that this same fog of plastic pieces extends deep beneath the surface. And deeper, it's worse than on the surface.

Previous research has revealed that microplastic concentrations in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch were about 12 particles per cubic meter of water. "We finished at 16," Van Houtan said of his team's underwater discoveries.

The methods used on the high seas were very innovative and confirmed a gloomy picture of research developments over the past decade, said conservation scientist Brendan Godley, who studies plastic pollution of the oceans at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. United.

"Scientists are now beginning to realize that microplastics are really ubiquitous. They were found from the bottom of the sea to the top of the mountains, in the air we breathe and in the salt we put in our meals, "he said.

Peter Ross, a toxicologist who studies the effects of microplastics on the marine life of Canada's Vancouver Aquarium, in Vancouver, British Columbia, says the biggest shock is that it does not make any difference. is not surprising to find the amount of plastic that there was even at the bottom of the ocean. .

"This research shows how we went from a zero understanding of the problem 15 years ago to a full recognition of the fact that this pollutant is completely distributed throughout our planet," he said.

What they found

Researchers used UAV micro-submarines to sample water from the surface to the bottom of the ocean at 3,200 feet. The sampling area included a site near Monterey Bay on the California coast and a site 15 miles off the coast.

The highest concentrations of microplastics were between 600 and 2000 feet deep.

They also inspected the bowels of the red pelagic crabs and some kind of jellyfish-like feeder filter called the giant larva. Both species play a key role in the oceanic food webs, from the surface to the seabed. Each of them contained plastic.

"Even if you do not care about crabs and larvae, they are the food of things you care about – tuna, seabirds, whales and turtles all feed or feed on things that feed them," he said. Anela Choy, professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and one of the authors of the journal.

Van Houtan thinks that, even though they sampled only two areas, they would find similar patterns given the ocean currents and the continuous combination of waters.

Laser spectroscopy allowed them to analyze the type of plastic from which each particle had been discovered, which also created surprises.

Some have suggested that the majority of plastic in the sea comes from commercial fishing gear thrown or lost. However, the researchers found that very few particles came from fishing gear. Almost all came from land-based sources.

The only good news Van Houtan has found is that the most important type of plastic they found floating in the water – about 40% – came from disposable plastics such as beverage and food containers.

"It's something we can do as consumers," Van Houtan said. "We can demand better alternatives for single-use products."

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