Pacific Ocean trash: Some people say it’s the size of Texas. Others, almost double the area of the continental U.S. Now scientists are saying it may actually be shrinking — and they’re not sure why.
The Great Pacific garbage patch, aka the Pacific trash vortex, has commonly been assumed to grow twice as big every decade. But researchers from the University of Cadiz in Spain have discovered that the huge piles of plastic debris they’d expect to find just aren’t there.
According to their report, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science on Monday, there’s simply 99% less plastic waste in the world’s oceans that previously thought.
In the 1970s, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences estimated that about 45,000 tons of plastic ended up in the ocean each year. Since then, global plastic production has since then gone up fivefold, the researchers wrote.
Against that backdrop, there should have been millions of tons of garbage in the oceans by now. However, the Cadiz scientists found — after looking at more than 3,000 water samples — that there’s “only” an estimated 7,000 to 35,000 tons of garbage in the oceans.
Now, that’s strange. Larger pieces of plastic usual break into tiny pieces of debris, but the majority of the small plastic fragments were missing, according to the study. That leaves four main possibilities as to what’s happening to the debris.
Fish may be eating it. If that’s the case, the tiny plastic particles are entering the “global ocean food web”, as noted by Science Magazine. Humans are a part of that food web, too.
The Spanish researcher also suggest the debris is being broken into even tinier pieces — “nanofragments” — that are impossible to detect and may have an unknown impact on the ocean environment. Or perhaps it’s being washed up and deposited on shore — though it’s “unlikely” that this would happen just to these tiny pieces, the academics say.
Best-case scenario? The garbage could simply just be sinking into the deep ocean, which means less wildlife comes into contact with the plastic pieces.
– Sara Sjolin
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