Biologists record increasing amounts of plastic litter in the Arctic deep sea: studies confirm that twice as much marine debris is lying on the seabed today compared to ten years ago

http://www.awi.de/en/news/press_releases/detail/item/biologist_find_more_and_more_plastic_waste_in_the_arctic_deep_sea/?cHash=6a86963d9579ef0efcda6734d726a63f

Bremerhaven, 22nd October 2012. The sea bed in the Arctic deep sea is 
increasingly strewn with litter and plastic waste. As reported in the 
advance online publication of the scientific journal Marine Pollution 
Bulletin by Dr. Melanie Bergmann, biologist and deep-sea expert at the 
Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz 
Association. The quantities of waste observed at the AWI deep-sea 
observatory HAUSGARTEN are even higher than those found in a deep-sea 
canyon near the Portuguese capital Lisbon.

For this study Dr. Melanie Bergmann examined some 2100 seafloor 
photographs taken near HAUSGARTEN, the deep-sea observatory of the 
Alfred Wegener Institute in the eastern Fram Strait. This is the sea 
route between Greenland and the Norwegian island Spitsbergen. “The study 
was prompted by a gut feeling. When looking through our images I got the 
impression that plastic bags and other litter on the seafloor were seen 
more frequently in photos from 2011 than in those dating back to earlier 
years. For this reason I decided to go systematically through all photos 
from 2002, 2004, 2007, 2008 and 2011,” Melanie Bergmann explains.

Biologists record increasing amounts of plastic litter in the Arctic deep sea: studies confirm that twice as much marine debris is lying on the seabed today compared to ten years ago