An essay published in the journal Royal Society Open Science warns that the deep ocean is becoming a large reservoir of plastic waste.
As indicated in this work by a team of researchers coordinated by experts from the University of Plymouth and the Museum of Natural History, in London, in which scientists from the University of Barcelona have also participated, in each square kilometer of marine sediments can be found around of 4,000 million microscopic remains of this compound.
In recent years, studies that have been carried out on the accumulation of plastics on the coasts and on the surface of the seas, a global environmental problem , have not revealed a special increase in their concentrations. However, this could be due to the fact that they are being deposited at the bottom, where the number of plastic fibers is already four times that of shallow waters. “We have been wondering for a long time where all these plastics would have gone.
Now we know that much of it has become fibers invisible to the human eye that have sunk to the bottom ” , says Lucy Woodall, a zoologist at the Museum of Natural History, who has participated in the research. "It is alarming to find such levels of pollution, especially since the effect of these wastes on delicate ocean ecosystems is unknown."
