Arctic sea ice is an important temporal sink and means of transport for microplastic
By Ilka Peeken, S. Primpke, B. Beyer, Julia Gütermann, C. Katlein, Thomas Krumpen, Melanie Bergmann, Laura Hehemann, G. Gerdts. Nature Communications, 2018
846 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Microplastics (MP) are recognized as a growing environmental hazard and have been identified as far as the remote Polar Regions, with particularly high concentrations of microplastics in sea ice. Little is known regarding the horizontal variability of MP within sea ice and how the underlying water body affects MP composition during sea ice growth. Here we show that sea ice MP has no uniform polymer composition and that, depending on the growth region and drift paths of the sea ice, unique MP patterns can be observed in different sea ice horizons. Thus even in remote regions such as the Arctic Ocean, certain MP indicate the presence of localized sources. Increasing exploitation of Arctic resources will likely lead to a higher MP load in the Arctic sea ice and will enhance the release of MP in the areas of strong seasonal sea ice melt and the outflow gateways. Microplastic (MP) pollution in polar regions is a growing environmental concern, yet little is known regarding the role of sea-ice as a sink and transport vector of MPs. Here, the authors show that MPs in sea-ice have no uniform polymer composition and observe unique MP patterns in different sea-ice horizons.
Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Pollution, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3030dfea1995aef843a5a12a2297708b9e688a5f
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Citations in the corpus
- A Global Perspective on Microplastics (2020, background): “Microplastics have recently been discovered in presumably pristine locales, including Arctic sea ice (Peeken et al., 2018), the Antarctic (Waller et al., 2017), remote mountain ranges (Allen et al., 2019), and deep ocean trenches (Jamieson et al., 2019).”
- White and wonderful? Microplastics prevail in snow from the Alps to the Arctic (2019, methodology): “Variable polymer compositions were also reported from Arctic sea ice and deep-sea sediments (15, 16).”
- Contributions of Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy in microplastic pollution research: A review (2020, methodology): “…oxide filters, and metal covered PC filters) (Bergmann et al., 2017; Loder et al., 2015; Mani, Primpke, et al., 2019; Mintenig et al., 2017, 2019; Peeken et al., 2018; Primpke et al., 2017, 2018, 2019; Primpke, Christiansen, et al., 2020), silicon membranes (Kappler et al., 2015, 2016),…”
- The physical oceanography of the transport of floating marine debris (2020, background): “…of transport and redistribution for sediments (Nürnberg et al 1994, Gregory et al 2002); various pollutants and contaminants in polar regions (Pfirman et al 1997, Rigor and Colony 1997, Korsnes et al 2002), including oil spills (Blanken et al 2017); as well asmicroplastics (Peeken et al 2018b).”