The researchers used a helicopter to land on ice floes and retrieve the samples during an 18-day icebreaker expedition through the Northwest Passage, the hazardous route linking the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
“When we look at it up close and we see that it’s all very, very visibly contaminated when you look at it with the right tools – it felt a little bit like a punch a gut,” Strock toldStrock and his colleagues found the material trapped in ice taken from four locations in Lancaster Sound, an isolated stretch of water in the Canadian Arctic, which they had assumed might be relatively sheltered from drifting plastic pollution.
The scientists’ dismay was reminiscent of the consternation felt by explorers who found plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean’s Marianas Trench, the deepest place on Earth, during submarine dives earlier this year. But the plastic fragments – known as micro plastic – also served to highlight how the waste problem has reached epidemic proportions, with an estimated 100 million tonnes of plastic dumped in the oceans to date, according to the United Nations.
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