14 DAY TRIAL // Greenheads might be fighting long and hard to protect the Arctic but, as it turns out, this region has already been compromised. And I'm not talking about how climate change and global warming are reshaping landscapes in this part of the world.
Not to beat about the bush, Alaska Dispatch tells us that researcher Rachel Obbard with the Dartmouth College in the United States has recently come across teeny-tiny bits and pieces of plastic in Arctic sea ice.
Interestingly enough, the scientist was not even looking for traces of microplastic pollution at the time she found the plastic fragments. On the contrary, Rachel Obbard was interested in finding microorganisms.
Needless to say, this discovery just goes to show that microplastic pollution is a bigger problem that people think it to be, and that the garbage we, humans, have been improperly disposing of over the years is now working its way into remote ecosystems.
Rachel Obbard and fellow researchers estimate that, under a business-as-usual scenario, some 2,040 trillion cubic meters of ice in the Arctic will melt over the course of the following ten years.
Provided that this ice contains as many microplastics as the samples analyzed by the Dartmouth College researchers did, about 1 trillion such very small plastic fragments could be released into the environment.