A new study suggests that plastic particles on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea are accumulating at an alarming rate
While we know much of the plastic waste we generate winds up in bodies of water, what happens to it from there is still a large unknown. A new study documenting the accumulation of microplastic particles on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea has shed some new light on the issue, with the authors coming to the striking conclusion that concentrations of this material on the floor of the Med has tripled since 2000. In recent years, we’ve seen scientists start to uncover some useful insights around how plastic behaves in the marine environment. These include studies detailing underwater avalanches that drive microplastics into the deep ocean and the discovery that deep-sea trenches can act as plastic traps. In 2020, scientists studying pollution in the Mediterranean Sea identified a hotspot with the highest concentration of microplastics ever found on the seafloor.
A separate team from Spain’s Autonomous University of Barcelona and Denmark’s Aalborg University have now published more research concerning microplastics in the Mediterranean Sea, with a focus on how they sink into the seafloor, and what happens when they do.
The team collected a sediment core from the western Mediterranean Sea and used advanced imaging technology to study particles as small as 11 micrometers. This enabled the scientists to fill in important details around the accumulation of small microplastics in marine sediment, and understand how they are potentially altered after becoming embedded in the material.
Read more here: https://newatlas.com/environment/microplastics-mediterranean-sea-triple-20-years/