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New studies show that the number of fragments embedded in the seabed is greater than the plastic floating on the ocean surface.
By Tiffany May
Our plastic bags to end up floating like jellyfish soaked in the sea.
Discarded bottles of pristine beaches around the world.
Today, scientists can glimpse what happens when small plastic fragments break off and end up at the back of the ocean.
In what users called the first estimate of its kind, Australia’s national clinical firm says between 9. 25 and 15. 87 million tons of microplastics, fragments measured between five millimeters and a micrometer, are embedded in the back of the sea.
It’s much more than in the ocean.
This represents about 18 to 24 bags of groceries filled with small plastic fragments for each foot of the hill on every continent of Antarctica.
This is a challenge activists have long warned about, even as the struggle to cover the ocean has largely focused on eliminating single-use plastic products, such as buying grocery bags.
The findings were published Monday in a new one through the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, or C. S. I. R. O. , highlighting how human use of plastics has infiltrated the depths of the world’s oceans.
“It shows the ubiquity of the problem. It’s everywhere, all the time and on the rise,” Britta Denise Hardesty, lead scientist at C. S. I. R. O. , said Wednesday. and author of the study, in a telephone interview.
Microplastics are confined to the ocean. They are also discovered in air debris and can be dispersed through the wind. A variety of microplastics have even been detected in the human gut.
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