Amount of plastic in the Atlantic Ocean has been ‘massively underestimated’
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Estimates for the amount of plastic dumped in the Atlantic Ocean have been “massively underestimated”, experts have said.
There are 12-21 million tonnes of tiny plastic fragments floating in the Atlantic Ocean, scientists have found.
A study, led by the UK’s National Oceanography Centre, scooped through layers of the upper 200m (650ft) of the ocean during a research expedition through the middle of the Atlantic.
Such an amount of plastic – 21 million tonnes – would be enough to fully load almost 1,000 container ships.
The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.
Dr Katsia Pabortsava, from the National Oceanography Centre, who led the study, said by measuring the mass of very small plastic particles in the top 5% of the ocean, she and her colleagues could estimate “the load of plastic in the entire Atlantic” which is “much larger” than the previous figure.
“Previously, we haven’t been able to balance the amount of plastic we found in the ocean with the amount we thought we had put in,” she said.
“That’s because we weren’t measuring the very smallest particles.”
Professor Richard Lampitt, from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) and one of the co-authors of the paper, said that “this paper demonstrates that scientists have had a totally inadequate understanding of even the simplest of these factors, how much is there, and it would seem our estimates of how much is dumped into the ocean has been massively underestimated.”
