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As experts recently found out, plastic falling into the sea, it does not necessarily remain to drift to the surface. Some part of it settles on the seabed and coral reefs. It’s no secret that pollution of the oceans experts call one of the most big environmental problems. As reported in one of the articles, published the other day in a scientific publication, the total weight of plastic garbage found in ocean waters exceeds 250 thousand tons It is worth noting that this is not the first attempt by scientists to evaluate the extent of pollution, however, before the figures were indicated significantly more modest – from 7 to 35 thousand tons. It is worth noting that this the amount also seems to experts in the field of ecology underestimated. As noted in various reports, plastic is in the ocean in different options. Particular hazards are small particles, which enter the stomachs of fish, birds, marine animals. Special small parts can even get inside microscopic plankton. Dangerous plastic chips form during the gradual destruction or grinding of larger objects from this material, for example, plastic bottles. Moreover, experts found some discrepancy between the amount large and small plastic floating in ocean waters. By environmentalists say some piece of plastic material simply disappears somewhere. And for a long time they could not understand where. Specialists put forward various hypotheses, as to where the piece of plastic goes. Some thought that in the course of the study, some of its volume escapes attention scientists, as if during the collection of material part of it was lost. According to another hypothesis, small pieces of plastic chips remain in marine animals, settling in their tissues, or completely disintegrate under the influence of any bacteria or inorganic processes. It has also been suggested that part of the plastic throws ashore. But all these hypotheses, however, cannot explain so much missing plastic. In addition, chemists stated that plastic cannot degrade on such a scale so how to learn how to make bioplastics recently and in the World the oceans are still mostly floating ordinary polymeric compounds. But not so long ago, British scientist Richard Thompson from Plymouth University with colleagues from other universities in the country voiced a new version of the mysterious disappearance of plastic parts waste. They decided to look for plastic at the bottom of the ocean, and their search crowned with success. Environmentalists have done a great job collecting samples of material on the seabed of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and Indian Ocean.
As a result, in all samples taken from the bottom, researchers found tiny strands of plastic about 2-3 mm long and 0.1 mm thick. On 50 ml of sediment, the average number of such threads amounted to 13 pieces. Scientists also found on coral reefs plastic debris that most likely sticks to the mucus, secreted by polyps. Thus, if we make calculations only for Indian Ocean, it turns out that for every square kilometer its bottom accounts for 4 billion plastic microfilaments. And if still take into account that also plastic was found in samples of the Mediterranean of the sea and the Atlantic, then we can consider the entire bottom of the oceans on today is a kind of storage of plastic mass, which mankind produces in unlimited quantities each year. According to the researchers, the chemical composition of the detected garbage consists of 57 percent viscose and 43 percent of polyester. Thus, we can say that if the inhabitants of the Earth want to cleanse the oceans from plastic pollution, then they should know where this garbage is located. Otherwise, you cannot create effective methods of cleaning it.
Plastic
