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Even In The Arctic, Plastic Debris Pollution Has Now Arrived

A new study finds plastic debris on the floor of the once pristine Arctic Ocean, the latest sign of environmental damage of global waste.

New plastic bags are found everyday on the floor of the Arctic Ocean
New plastic bags are found everyday on the floor of the Arctic Ocean
Thomas Wagner-Nagy

The Arctic Ocean was for a long time considered as virtually untouched by pollution. But in the past decade, the amount of plastic garbage on the ocean floor has doubled and is now “higher than the amount recorded from a deep-sea canyon not far from the industrialized Portuguese capital Lisbon,” according to a new study.

Plastic garbage doesn’t just float around in the high seas: these remnants of modern civilization also sink to the bottom of the world’s oceans.

Research conducted by the Alfred Wegener Institut für Polar und Meeresforschung (Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research/AWI) shows that it has not only found its way to one of the most remote corners of the planet, but that the amount of plastic debris on the floor of the Arctic Ocean has doubled in the last 10 years.

For her study, published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin, marine biologist Melanie Bergmann compared 2,100 photographs of the deep seafloor taken at the institute’s deep-sea Hausgarten observatory. This observatory is located in the eastern Fram Strait, the sea route between Greenland and Norway’s Spitsbergen Island. The set-up at the station consists of a remote-controlled camera system at a depth of 2,500 meters – about 1.5 meters above the ocean floor – that takes pictures of the seafloor every 30 seconds.

These photographs are generally used to record changes in biodiversity, but as she reviewed the images, Bergmann was struck by the fact that in 2011 a great deal more garbage was visible than had been on photographs from earlier expeditions. "Waste can be seen in around 1% of the images from 2002, primarily plastic," she reports. In 2011, about 2% of the pictures show garbage, leading Bergmann to conclude that the amount of garbage on the ocean has doubled in the past ten years.

The pictures do not reveal where the garbage in the Arctic Ocean comes from. Bergmann suspects that the increased amounts are due to the shrinking and thinning of the Arctic ice, as well as the intensification of ship traffic in the area. Research on the trash picked up on Spitsbergen beaches shows that it comes from high seas fishing boats.

On the ocean floor, “67% of the plastic litter was entangled or colonized by invertebrates such as sponges (41%) or sea anemones (15%).” As plastic bags can affect gas exchange processes, Bergmann believes that it is possible that long-term the trash could change the composition of species and biodiversity on the ocean floor.

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Society

Genoa Postcard: A Tale Of Modern Sailors, Echos Of The Ancient Mariner

Many seafarers are hired and fired every seven months. Some keep up this lifestyle for 40 years while sailing the world. Some of those who'd recently docked in the Italian port city of Genoa, share a taste of their travels that are connected to a long history of a seafaring life.

A sailor smokes a cigarette on the hydrofoil Procida

A sailor on the hydrofoil Procida in Italy

Daniele Frediani/Mondadori Portfolio via ZUMA Press
Paolo Griseri

GENOA — Cristina did it to escape after a tough breakup. Luigi because he dreamed of adventures and the South Seas. Marianna embarked just “before the refrigerator factory where I worked went out of business. I’m one of the few who got severance pay.”

To hear their stories, you have to go to the canteen on Via Albertazzi, in Italy's northern port city of Genoa, across from the ferry terminal. The place has excellent minestrone soup and is decorated with models of the ships that have made the port’s history.

There are 38,000 Italian professional sailors, many of whom work here in Genoa, a historic port of call that today is the country's second largest after Trieste on the east coast. Luciano Rotella of the trade union Italian Federation of Transport Workers says the official number of maritime workers is far lower than the reality, which contains a tangle of different laws, regulations, contracts and ethnicities — not to mention ancient remnants of harsh battles between shipowners and crews.

The result is that today it is not so easy to know how many people sail, nor their nationalities.

What is certain is that every six to seven months, the Italian mariner disembarks the ship and is dismissed: they take severance pay and after waits for the next call. Andrea has been sailing for more than 20 years: “When I started out, to those who told us we were earning good money, I replied that I had a precarious life: every landing was a dismissal.”

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