Researchers used helicopters to land on ice floes and collect samples during an 18-day icebreaker expedition through the Northwest Passage, the route between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
The Northwest Passage Project focuses primarily on investigating the impact of man-made climate change on the Arctic, whose role as the planet's cooling system is threatened by the rapid disappearance of summer sea ice.
“We spent weeks looking for ancient white sea ice floating in the ocean. When we looked closely at it, we found visible contaminants with the right tools. We were quite surprised,” said Jacob Strock, a researcher at the University of Rhode Island who conducted the initial analysis of the cores.
Microplastics have found their way into water sources in some of the most remote places on the planet.
Strock and colleagues found the material trapped in ice taken from Lancaster Sound, an isolated stretch of water in the Canadian Arctic, which they thought might be relatively sheltered from drifting plastic pollution.
The team pulled 18 ice cores up to 2 meters long from four locations and found visible plastic particles and fibers of various shapes and sizes.
Pollution will directly affect the lives of bears.
The United Nations estimates that 100 million tonnes of plastic have been dumped into the oceans so far. Once again, microplastics show that the waste problem has reached alarming levels.
