In our previous post, we discovered how plastic is harmful not only to marine life but also humans when they travel up to our food chain. Today we are going to talk about the accumulation of microplastic in the Arctic.
The Arctic can be said to be a sink for microplastic and plastics such as nylon, polyester, and bottle caps account for half of all particles present. The following video debunks our geographical imagination that the Arctic as a pristine place free from pollution. However, little is known as to how plastics pollution is affecting the Arctic ecosystems.
Plastic waste dumped into our oceans deteriorates and gets transported with the ocean currents to areas far from the sources of disposal. Microplastics are often mixed throughout the water column and they are likely to end up in polar regions.
It was hypothesized that plastics gather near the edges of Arctic Ocean due to the northbound Atlantic water cooling and sinking. Unfortunately, the sources of microplastic are not well established. However, since Fram strait is one of the main inflow gateways to Central Arctic Ocean, microplastic may have been transported offshore North Atlantic waters into the Arctic Ocean (Peeken et al., 2018).
Trash transported with ocean currents
Analysis also discovered that microplastic is capable of transporting through the atmosphere up to 95 km (Allen et al., 2019). Therefore, they have the ability to affect places that are sparsely inhibited and remote such as the French Pyrenees mountain. This could mean that air is another potential vector in which microplastic can be transported and deposited in the Arctic snow.
Cheers,
Shee Wen & Nicole 
Reference
Allen, S., Allen, D., Phoenix, V.R., Le Roux, G., Durántez Jiménez, P., Simonneau, A., Binet, S. & Galop, D. (2019), “Atmospheric transport and deposition of microplastics in a remote mountain catchment”, Nature geoscience, vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 339-344.
Katz, C. (2019). National Geographic. Why does the Arctic have more plastic than most places on Earth? Retrieved September 15, 2020, from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/10/remote-arctic-contains-more-plastic-than-most-places-on-earth/#:~:text=Plastics%20across%20the%20North&text=Within%20this%20passage%20between%20east,per%20liter%20of%20sea%20ice.&text=Arctic%20Ocean%20surface%20waters%20hold%20the%20most%20plastics%20of%20any%20ocean%20basin.
Peeken, I., Primpke, S., Beyer, B., Gütermann, J., Katlein, C., Krumpen, T., Bergmann, M., Hehemann, L. & Gerdts, G. (2018), “Arctic sea ice is an important temporal sink and means of transport for microplastic”, Nature communications, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 1505-12.
Seltenrich, N. (2015), “New Link in the Food Chain? Marine Plastic Pollution and Seafood Safety”, Environmental health perspectives, vol. 123, no. 2, pp. A34-A41.