Ocean Pollution – Fusion Nepal

The ocean is full of trash.

Whether it’s on the coast, near the coast, in the open ocean, or on the seafloor, evidence of humanity’s impact on the environment is widespread and abundant.

Each year, 160 billion pounds of trash is dumped into the oceans. And then it gets trapped.

These plastics are continuously swept up into rotating currents into what scientists call convergent or accumulation zones where they settle into gyres or “garbage patches” and wreak havoc on ecosystems in every ocean in the world — sometimes in multiple places. Read more…

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At some 35,700 feet beneath the ocean, there is a white plastic bag lying in the sand at the deepest ocean depths, in the Mariana Trench.

Scientists have known about the bag since May 1998, when a robotic deep-sea submersible spotted it while surveying the bottom of the trench. But a recent study on deep-sea plastic pollution gave this sad bag — representative of the planet’s amplifying plastic pollution problem — new life.

It is still the deepest known piece of plastic debris on our planet, say the researchers. The trench’s literal deepest depth isn’t much further down, at approximately 36,200 feet. Read more…

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