Plastic trash has infiltrated the Arctic. Two new studies have spied bags, fishing rope and tinier bits of rubbish in the Barents Sea.
This sea sits north of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. It mixes with the Arctic Ocean, which is even farther north.
Barents Sea
The Barents Sea is that part of the Arctic that runs between parts of northern Russia and Greenland.
NORMANEINSTEIN/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
“We often think that the filthy habits we have where we live don’t go as far as the Arctic,” says Erik van Sebille. He studies Earth’s climate and oceans at Imperial College London in England. He was not involved in the new studies but says the data show the Arctic is no longer a vast, pristine wilderness. It is becoming trashy. This is not surprising, he says, but very disappointing.
Plastic trash in the Arctic could harm wildlife and may hint that large volumes of human rubbish are collecting there, says Melanie Bergmann. She is one of the scientists who spotted the trash. She studies Earth’s oceans at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany. She first started counting bits of plastics in the Barents Sea because she kept spotting signs of the stuff there in images taken with deep-sea cameras.
Bergmann and her colleagues counted pieces of plastic from an icebreaker, a boat designed to break through large chunks of ice in very cold waters. They also tracked plastic pieces they saw during helicopter rides over Arctic waters. The team found 31 pieces of plastic. “That doesn’t seem like much, but it shows us that we’ve really got a problem, one that extends even to this remote area, far from civilization,” Bergmann says. She and her colleagues described their findings October 21 in Polar Biology.
Another team has also been counting plastics in the area. Those scientists scooped water from the Barents Sea and counted the number of smaller bits of plastics, called microplastics. It’s the first time scientists have counted plastics floating in the Arctic waters, the team wrote October 8 in Scientific Reports.