Arctic Ocean Ice is Loaded with Microplastics, New Finding Reveals

Scientists recently extracted sea ice riddled with microplastics from deep inside an ice block from the Arctic Ocean, that are likely to be drifted southward, past Greenland into Canada’s navigable northwest passage between Pacific Oceans and the Atlantic.

The extracted part looks like a lie hard candy, laced with flecks of fake fruit. Later the Scientists extracted more such microplastics from the Arctic Ocean. 

Ice expert Alessandra D’Angelo, one of the research scientists who is collecting and analysing data during her 18-day expedition onboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden said, “We didn’t expect this amount of plastic, we were shocked”. She also said, “There is so much of it, and of every kind beads, filaments, nylons”.

When the Northwest Passage Project first started, plastic pollution was not its primary focus. Oceanographer Brice Loose is leading the project which is on a mission to investigate how global warming may transform the biochemistry and ecosystems of the expansive Canadian Arctic Archipelago. 

The project funded by the US National Science Foundation and Heising-Simons Foundation started with one key question. The researchers started with finding out whether the receding ice pack and an influx of freshwater will boost the release of methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than CO2 into the atmosphere. 

But plastics have inserted itself onto the research agenda all of a sudden with new discovery of microplastics. Loose said, “The ubiquity of plastic, for us it was kind of a punch to the stomach. Just to see what looked like a normal ice core in such a pristine environment chock full of this completely foreign material”.

The study published recently in Science Advances has concluded that a large quantity of microplastic fragments and fibres are transported by winds into the Arctic region, which are then takes ride Earthward in snowflakes. At the same time, several million tonnes of plastics find their way each year directly into oceans from the countries across the world, where waves break them down into microscopic bits with time.

The samples collected by Loose’s team near the hamlet of resolute with low salinity and thickness of the ice, left no doubt that the ice riddled plastics bits are more than a year old originated in the Arctic Ocean and also the finding reveals that the concentration of plastic bits in the ice was higher than in the surrounding water.

Jacob Strock, another member of the research team explained, “As water freezes it forms crystals. Water passes through these crystals as they form. The ice acts like a sieve, filtering out particles in the water”.

Tiny plants and animals, which are called plankton also gets trapped in the ice. Some plankton ingests the plastic bits, which then work their way up the ocean food chain.

Plastic particles are also found inside fish recently in the deep recesses of the ocean called the Mariana Trench, which blankets the most pristine snows in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain.

In the last two decades, the production of plastic globally was much higher and the industry is set to grow by four percent every year until 2025. If not acted with focus, the earth may turn into a bundle of plastic in the years to come.