US EditionOcean floor a 'reservoir' of plastic pollution, study finds
25 Articles
25 Articles
Ocean Floor Littered With Plastic Pollution: CSIRO
In 1997, Captain Charles Moore was returning from a trans-Pacific race when he made a shocking discovery in a remote part of the ocean. Before him was a truly gigantic, floating mass of mostly plastic waste he dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Similar garbage patches are now known to exist in all five of the earth’s swirling gyres in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans—inescapable evidence of society’s unabated addition to plastic. Bu…
The global plastic consumption is huge, and it is growing at a high rate. Analysis shows that the oceans are already full of garbage. A significant part of it is stored on the ground.
In the world's oceans, on average, every minute there's a plastic garbage truck full of plastic that ends up floating in the water, and then a lot of that plastic is dumped into the atmosphere, where it's estimated that there's about three to 11 million tons of plastic waste at the bottom of the ocean, according to a study done by the Australian Science Agency and University of Toronto.
For the first time, researchers were able to capture with underwater vehicles how much plastic waste accumulates on the ocean floor. The deeper the waste is, the slower it decomposes.
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