Like a soup full of lumps. In the subtropical gyre of the North Pacific, home of North Pacific Garbage Patch – better known as the “plastic continent” – the concentration of small plastic waste has skyrocketed, reveals a study by the NGO The Ocean Cleanup published on Tuesday, November 19 in the magazine Environmental research letters. In this area, which covers six times the surface of France, we could find up to 10 million microparticles per square kilometer in 2022, ten times more than in 2015.
“This data was collected thanks to our cleaning operations at sea”specifies Laurent Lebreton, head of research at the NGO and first author of the study. “In addition to contributing to the elimination of pollution, these cleanup campaigns provide unique platforms for collecting data in very remote environments”argues. In your eyes is the clear accumulation of small plastic fragments observed in the vortex in the space of just seven years. “particularly worrying”because “Although we knew that pollution was getting worse, we did not expect such an increase”.
“We suspected that there was an accumulation of microplastics in the ocean, but this had not yet been proven, greets Jean-François Ghiglione, CNRS research director at the Microbial Oceanography Laboratory of Banyuls-sur-Mer (Pyrénées-Orientales), who was not involved in this work. In most studies, samples are taken somewhat randomly, but here, [les chercheurs] They spent seven years in the same place, in the North Pacific gyre – they are the only ones who go there on such a recurring basis – and they saw the evolution little by little. »
Fifty expeditions between 2015 and 2022
This work is based on the analysis of data collected during 50 expeditions carried out between 2015 and 2022, that is, more than a thousand samples – taken with nets of different sizes – and several dozen aerial observations carried out with the help of airplanes and drones.
The results show that within the vortex, the mass concentration of plastic fragments smaller than 5 centimeters (which includes microplastics from 0.5 to 5 millimeters and mesoplastics from 5 millimeters to 5 centimeters) increased from the average of 2.9 kilos per kilometer squared in 2015 at 14.2 kilos. per square kilometer in 2022. Their number has also increased significantly. This plastic continent located east of Hawaii “It absorbs everything around it due to weather phenomena that cause current to enter”specifies Jean-François Ghiglione.
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