The study shows that concentrations of microscopic plastic particles in the sea along the west coast of Greenland are roughly the same as in the Atlantic Ocean
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First quantification of microplastics off the coast of Nuuk
Nuuk, Greenland
Microscopic pieces of plastic approximately 0.1mm in length were found by researchers from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) Aqua and Environment research groups, Aalborg University, and the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources in water sampled from the fjord Nuup Kangerlua.
They found about 1 particle per 10 litres of water, which is similar to the concentrations previously found in seawater elsewhere in the North Atlantic. The researchers had expected to find much higher concentrations since their German counterparts have measured very high concentrations in snow and ice on the glaciers melting into Nuup Kangerlua. The results of the study have just been published in the scientific journal Environmental Pollution
Professor Torkel Gissel Nielsen, DTU Aqua, said: “There’s plastic in the fjord. Not as much as we would have expected based on the concentrations found by the Germans in snow and ice. But it’s there. And the plastic particles are generally very small. They are exactly of a size that the copepods in the area can eat, which means they can enter the marine food webs.”
The concentrations of plastic currently detected are unlikely to have significant adverse effects, but it could get worse.
The most abundant type of plastic was the polyester used in synthetic fabrics and plastic bottles. The second-most abundant type was polyamide or nylon, used in fishing nets.
Greenland’s capital was identified as a point source for the study because, when compared to the measuring stations further into the fjord, the abundance of microplastics increased the closer they were to Nuuk.