[ad_1]
DEN HELDER, The Netherlands – Pollution from marine plastics is now gaining worldwide attention. This was not the case 40 years ago, but Jan van Franeker, a young ocean biologist at the time, began to find threatening signs of pollution in the bodies of Northern fulmar birds in Canada. l & # 39; era.
Van Franeker, now 64, continues his research at the Wageningen Marine Research Institute, on top of a peninsula that is advancing in the North Sea. It was in the late 1970s that he noticed something odd: there were often pieces of plastic in the bodies of seabirds.
The birds were provided by fellow researchers who were trying to determine the impact of oil pollution on the species. They agreed that Van Franeker would dissect the birds to see if any oil was found in their bodies. "Sometimes I found oil, but a lot more plastic," said the researcher.
Van Franeker began recording all foreign objects found in northern fulmars. As the archives accumulated, his concerns about plastic pollution worsened. It was in 1985 that Van Franeker published the results of his research, pointing out that birds absorbed a "considerable" amount of plastics and that their consumption included toxic materials. Similar research has warned of abnormal changes in seabirds.
Today, 93% of fulmars in the northern North Sea have plastic in their bodies, according to a study conducted by Van Franeker and colleagues on 525 birds from 2010 to 2014. About 58% of sampled birds had taken 0.1 gram or more. Reducing this ratio to 10% or less is the goal of the signatories of the OSPAR Convention, designed to protect the marine environment of the North-East Atlantic.
Northern fulmars fly near the surface of the sea and eat fish. They are thought to be absorbing floating plastic waste or plastics wrongly consumed by fish. The average amount of material found in the body of a bird is 0.31 grams. A large part of plastics comes from plastic products that have become unidentifiable after being processed into small pieces or pellets for industrial use.
"If you think of a human-sized northern fulmar, the plastics it absorbs are about this size," says Van Franeker, showing a container the size of a box. lunch filled with plastic.
– Plastic pollution spreads to arctic regions
In September 2015, the Australian Organization for Scientific and Industrial Research of the Commonwealth and other agencies published the results of a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a leading journal American scientist. He warned that 99% of seabirds in the world could absorb plastic waste by 2050.
The study was based on research on the eating habits of seabirds since the mid-1960s. Using the data, the researchers estimated the impact of marine plastic pollution on the environment world.
In the early 1960s, less than 5% of seabirds absorbed plastics; in the mid-2010s, it is estimated that this proportion has reached almost 90%. During the period, global plastic production increased by a factor of twenty, and plastic products, including single-use items such as packaging, became commonplace in everyday people's lives. Plastic products drifting in the oceans are fragmented by the movement of the waves or the sun, but they never disappear and continue to float on the water.
The study found that the southern hemisphere suffered greater damage than the north. Researchers do not know how many birds have died because of plastic absorption. In an extreme case, waste weighing 8% of the weight of a seabird was found inside his body. This equates to 5 kilograms in a human weighing 62 kilograms.
The Arctic Sea, despite its pristine image, is part of the waters affected by plastic pollution. According to 31-year-old Susanne Kuhn, research associate at Van Franeker and specialist in Arctic sea fish species, two out of 72 young polar cod, 2.8% of the total, had microplastics in their bodies. Plastic fibers were excluded from the result because they drift in the air and could mistakenly merge with the samples.
Polar cod, which lays eggs under sea ice, is considered an important criterion for assessing the impact of plastic pollution on the Arctic Sea ecosystem. Kuhn said that 2.8% would not seem like much, but pointed out that the figure should be zero.
Other research has led to a better understanding of plastic pollution in the Arctic Sea. In April of this year, a research team from the Alfred Wegener Institute, which is leading a German study on the Arctic, reported that up to 12,000 microplastics had been found in one liter of sea ice taken from the sea Arctic by a research vessel.
According to the results of a study published in the British scientific journal Nature Communications, this figure was two to three times higher than the figures recorded since 2005. Plastics used for food packaging and cigarette filters were identified. the research team felt that fishing activities in the Arctic Sea were partially responsible for the pollution.
Nearly 70% of the detected plastic parts did not exceed 50 micrometers, one-twentieth of a millimeter in diameter. Their size facilitates their uptake by crabs and shrimps or small animals, says the research team. Ice in the Arctic Sea is melting due to global warming and, as the ice moves, researchers are worried that more plastic parts will be released into the sea.
(Original Japanese by Kosuke Hatta, Brussels Office)
Source link
