The Arctic Ocean as a dead end for floating plastics in the North Atlantic branch of the Thermohaline Circulation

Abstract

Atlantic surface circulation transports high loads of plastic debris to remote Arctic waters.

Low Abundance of Plastic Fragments in the Surface Waters of the Red Sea

“…The low number of plastic items collected only allowed the use of four size bins to analyse the plastic size distribution, in contrast with narrower size classes allowed by the larger number of items obtained in previous studies (Cózar et al, 2014(Cózar et al, , 2015(Cózar et al, , 2017. Once the plastic abundances were normalized by the width of the size bins, the highest abundance appeared in the size range between 0.5 and 1 mm (55.1%) (Figure 3C).…”

“…High plastic accumulation zones were hypothesized, and confirmed, in each of the five subtropical gyres (Law et al, 2010;Goldstein, 2012;Cózar et al, 2014), and semi-enclosed systems, such as the Mediterranean (Cózar et al, 2015;Ruiz-Orejón et al, 2016;Suaria et al, 2016) and the Arctic Ocean (Cózar et al, 2017), which has been equated to a "polar Mediterranean" because of being surrounded by continents and linked to global ocean circulation through terminal surface currents (Aagaard et al, 1985;Østerhus et al, 2005). However, extensive areas remain yet unexplored, particularly semi-enclosed basins highly susceptible to accumulate plastic because of the limited hydrodynamic capacity to transfer the inputs they receive from land or import through ocean circulation into the open ocean.…”

Micro-and macro-plastics in marine species from Nordic waters

“…Most of the marine litter consist of plastics, for example a survey in the Barents Sea in 2014 found that plastics were the most dominant marine litter in pelagic and bottom trawls (Eriksen, 2014) Currents can impact the distribution of plastics since it can be transported everywhere by time, regardless of origin (van Sebille et al, 2012). It is suspected that buoyant plastics are transported into the Nordic environment on the ocean currents from further afield, such as through transport from the North Atlantic or the North Atlantic Drift (van Sebille et al, 2012;Amy L Lusher et al, 2015;Cózar et al, 2017).…”

“…It was also hypothesised that as the sea ice retreats and shipping and fishing activity increase there may be greater input of marine pollution in to the Arctic, although base-line data on contamination from ocean transport and local input are required . Furthermore, a recent study by Cózar based on empirical data has now shown that the occurrences of an accumulation zone in the Arctic is indeed the case, with high microplastic concentrations being found in the northern and eastern areas of the Greenland and Barents Seas (Cózar et al, 2017). Sea ice can be both a source and sink for entrained plastics in the Arctic, such that it accumulates floating microplastics when it freezes which are then released when it melts (Obbard et al, 2014;.…”

Fulmar Litter EcoQO monitoring in the Netherlands : update 2016

“…Accumulation of marine plastic litter, including a 'soup' of microplastics, in all major gyres of the oceans (Moore 2008;Law et al 2010;Maximenko et al 2012;Van Sebille et al 2012, 2015 and in deep-sea sediments and polar sea-ice (e.g. Obbard et al 2014;Fischer et al 2015;Cózar et al 2017;Munari et al 2017;Tekman et al 2017) (OSPAR 2008(OSPAR , 2009(OSPAR , 2010a(OSPAR , 2010b(OSPAR , 2015a. The fulmar EcoQO monitoring has been included as an indicator for marine litter in the approach for Good Environmental Status in the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive (Galgani et al 2010;EC 2010; MSFD GES Technical Subgroup on Marine Litter 2011).…”