Plastic On The Ocean Floor

The harmful plastic debris has been pulled down by powerful deep sea currents that create microplastic hotspots a deep sea equivalent of so called garbage patches created by currents on the ocean.

Plastic on the ocean floor.

This graphic shows several ocean floor features on a scale from 0 35 000 feet below sea level. The accumulation of floating plastic accounts for less than 1 of the 10 million tons of plastic that enter the world s oceans each year according to research spearheaded by the university of. The new research published in the journal royal society open science adds new details to earlier research that only discovered plastic bits in sea floor sediment in 2014. Plastic ends up on the ocean floor according to a new research report most plastic fragments end up on the ocean floor.

Among the top 10 kinds of trash picked up during the 2017 international coastal cleanup were food wrappers beverage bottles grocery bags straws and take out containers all made of plastic. In your home your office your school and your ocean. The norwegian environment agency is calling for several measures to combat the problem of plastics in the oceans. The new study printed on monday by the commonwealth scientific and industrial analysis group or c s i r o in.

If you extrapolated the results that would mean that in this location of the ocean floor there are 4 billion plastic fibers within one square kilometer an area less than a third of the size of. Continental shelf 300 feet continental slope 300 10 000 feet abyssal plain 10 000 feet abyssal hill 3 000 feet up from the abyssal plain seamount 6 000 feet. At least 14 million tonnes of plastic parts less than 5mm wide are likely to be found at the bottom of the world s oceans according to an estimate based on new research analysis of ocean sediments as deep as 3 km suggests that there may be more than 30 times more plastic at the bottom of the world s ocean than there is floating on the surface. But it fleshes out the.