Post by nurefatehi on Feb 26, 2024 23:02:03 GMT -6
The world's seas could be home to a vast reservoir of hitherto unidentified pollution, the growing load of the oceans' plastic tide. Up to 21 million of tiny, invisible plastic fibers could be floating in the first 200 meters of the Atlantic Ocean alone, and as British research exposed the scale of the problem, American chemists revealed that for the first time they had found microplastic fibers embedded in human organ tissues. A day or two later, Dutch scientists claimed that plastic waste was not simply a passive danger to marine life: experiments showed that polluting plastic released chemicals into the stomachs of seabirds. But first, the global problem. Oceanographers have known for decades that plastic debris has found its way into the sea: floating on the surface, washed up on beaches in remote Antarctica, sampled in Arctic waters, identified in seafloor sediments and ingested. by creatures, from the smallest to the whale family. Ominously, researchers warn that the sheer mass of plastic waste could triple in the coming decades. And unlike all other forms of human pollution, plastic waste is here to stay, one day forming a permanent geological layer that will mark the era of the Anthropocene.
Scientists report in the journal Nature Communications that at 12 locations along a 10,000 km journey from north to south in the Atlantic in late 2015, waters Nigeria WhatsApp Number List were sampled for evidence of just three forms of plastic debris: polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene. These samples were taken at depths of 10 meters below the surface, between 10 and 30 meters below what oceanographers call the mixed layer, and then 100 meters even deeper. Then they looked for fragments of the three plastics down to a scale of 25 millionths of a meter, and began counting. They found up to 7,000 particles of all three types in one cubic meter of seawater. Then they did the sums: people have been throwing away plastic bags, packaging, bottles, cups, nets and containers since 1950, and it has gone into the Atlantic, with a mass estimated so far at 17 to 47 million tons. The Atlantic has an average depth of 3000 meters. The discovery that the mass of plastic in the upper 200 meters of an ocean alone is somewhere between 12 and 21 million suggests that the flow of plastic in seas around the world may have been seriously underestimated.
Measurement Previously, we couldn't balance the mass of floating plastic we observed with the mass we believed had entered the ocean since 1950. This is because previous studies had not been measuring the concentrations of 'invisible' microplastic particles beneath the ocean surface. Our research is the first to do this across the entire Atlantic, from the UK to the Falklands. , UK National Oceanography Centre. Large plastic fragments deform the landscape and represent a direct threat to animals that mistake them for food. No one yet knows how dangerous microplastic fibers can be, but if they are consumed by small animals, they soon concentrate on larger predators, including the largest of all: humans. The scientists told the American Chemical Society, in a virtual meeting, that they had developed the techniques necessary to identify microplastic fibers in 47 samples of donated lungs, liver, spleen and kidneys: that is, such fragments did more than simply pass through of a gastrointestinal tract. They became part of human flesh. Seabird vulnerability There is evidence that plastic is making its way into our bodies, but very few studies have looked for it there. And right now, we don't know if this plastic is just a nuisance or if it poses a danger to human health.
Scientists report in the journal Nature Communications that at 12 locations along a 10,000 km journey from north to south in the Atlantic in late 2015, waters Nigeria WhatsApp Number List were sampled for evidence of just three forms of plastic debris: polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene. These samples were taken at depths of 10 meters below the surface, between 10 and 30 meters below what oceanographers call the mixed layer, and then 100 meters even deeper. Then they looked for fragments of the three plastics down to a scale of 25 millionths of a meter, and began counting. They found up to 7,000 particles of all three types in one cubic meter of seawater. Then they did the sums: people have been throwing away plastic bags, packaging, bottles, cups, nets and containers since 1950, and it has gone into the Atlantic, with a mass estimated so far at 17 to 47 million tons. The Atlantic has an average depth of 3000 meters. The discovery that the mass of plastic in the upper 200 meters of an ocean alone is somewhere between 12 and 21 million suggests that the flow of plastic in seas around the world may have been seriously underestimated.
Measurement Previously, we couldn't balance the mass of floating plastic we observed with the mass we believed had entered the ocean since 1950. This is because previous studies had not been measuring the concentrations of 'invisible' microplastic particles beneath the ocean surface. Our research is the first to do this across the entire Atlantic, from the UK to the Falklands. , UK National Oceanography Centre. Large plastic fragments deform the landscape and represent a direct threat to animals that mistake them for food. No one yet knows how dangerous microplastic fibers can be, but if they are consumed by small animals, they soon concentrate on larger predators, including the largest of all: humans. The scientists told the American Chemical Society, in a virtual meeting, that they had developed the techniques necessary to identify microplastic fibers in 47 samples of donated lungs, liver, spleen and kidneys: that is, such fragments did more than simply pass through of a gastrointestinal tract. They became part of human flesh. Seabird vulnerability There is evidence that plastic is making its way into our bodies, but very few studies have looked for it there. And right now, we don't know if this plastic is just a nuisance or if it poses a danger to human health.