The pristine clear waters of the Arctic Ocean is affected badly due to human intervention. Parts of floating plastics dumped into the ocean waters have affected the unspoiled waters of the ocean. These drifts of plastics have floated into the waters due to powerful current systems that lead to the deposition of waste in the Greenland Sea and north of Scandinavia. As a part of the seven-month circumnavigation of the Arctic Ocean in 2013 by the scientists, the research onboard the vessel Tara recognized the excess of small plastic pieces in the Greenland and Barents seas. After a long surf on the world’s oceans, the scientists acclaimed the region as the “dead end for floating plastics". The researchers further claim that the use of plastics has become popular near about 60 years ago and since then the production is on a steep rise. In fact, they further agree that this is just the very initial phase of plastic migration to the Arctic Ocean.
The study was carried out by 12 researchers from various universities across eight countries that include Denmark, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. The study further portrays that approx. 300 billion tiny plastic pieces that are suspended in the Arctic Waters. The amount could even be higher. The speculation that plastic entered into the Arctic Sea via the ocean currents and not by the pollution can be proved via various factors. First, the Arctic region has a limited population and thus it seems pretty impossible to be by the local inhabitants. Secondly, the state that the plastics were found in was weathered which means it has been traveling for decades. Moreover, the study also revealed that the plastic parts were not found in much of the Arctic Ocean apart from the Greenland and Barents seas. Both the Greenland and Barents seas contained about 95 percent of the Arctic’s plastic. The Barents Sea happens to be a major fishery for cod, haddock, herring and other species. The question also arises whether these tiny plastic pieces have affected the sea animals as well. Scientists also noticed that most of the ocean plastic becomes lost before it reaches the Arctic. And as it takes a lot of time for plastic to travel across the world in ocean currents, the study concludes that the current waste is largely the work of North Americans and Europeans, who dumped it in the Atlantic. Image Credit: latest stories Any information taken from here should be credited to skymetweather.com
