@polly_springWhat sinks into the ocean doesn't disappear, it piles up somewhere we never look. That's the core of a global review from University of Barcelona researchers, who found seafloor waste in some spots sitting at landfill-level density. The Strait of Messina, the water between Italy and Sicily, holds more than one million debris pieces per square mile, which puts it among the most polluted seafloor regions on record. Currents, storms, and underwater canyons act as the delivery system, hauling trash off coastlines and down into deep-sea basins far below the surface. Plastic makes up roughly 62% of what settles on the bottom, and it can drift a long way before it does. The Mariana Trench has plastic at nearly 36,000 feet down. Projections based on current trends put the ocean at more than 3 billion metric tons of waste inside 30 years. Close to 700 marine species run into this stuff through entanglement, ingestion or chemical exposure, and abandoned fishing gear keeps trapping animals for decades through ghost fishing. Bags, nets, metal, glass, dumped equipment, it all ends up in the same place. Hard to care about what you can't see, but that debris lingers and reshapes ecosystems long after it's out of sight. The review ran in Environmental Research Letters in 2021 under the title "The quest for seafloor macrolitter: a critical review of background knowledge, current methods and future prospects."

@polly_springWhat sinks into the ocean doesn't disappear, it piles up somewhere we never look. That's the core of a global review from University of Barcelona researchers, who found seafloor waste in some spots sitting at landfill-level density. The Strait of Messina, the water between Italy and Sicily, holds more than one million debris pieces per square mile, which puts it among the most polluted seafloor regions on record. Currents, storms, and underwater canyons act as the delivery system, hauling trash off coastlines and down into deep-sea basins far below the surface. Plastic makes up roughly 62% of what settles on the bottom, and it can drift a long way before it does. The Mariana Trench has plastic at nearly 36,000 feet down. Projections based on current trends put the ocean at more than 3 billion metric tons of waste inside 30 years. Close to 700 marine species run into this stuff through entanglement, ingestion or chemical exposure, and abandoned fishing gear keeps trapping animals for decades through ghost fishing. Bags, nets, metal, glass, dumped equipment, it all ends up in the same place. Hard to care about what you can't see, but that debris lingers and reshapes ecosystems long after it's out of sight. The review ran in Environmental Research Letters in 2021 under the title "The quest for seafloor macrolitter: a critical review of background knowledge, current methods and future prospects."