INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Hundreds of pieces of plastic have been found in every litre of Antarctic seawater by scientists being followed by Sky News.In the first
attempt to quantify how much plastic has reached the pristine continent, scientists on British Antarctic Survey's (BAS) ship the James Clark
Ross have filtered the water in fjords along the Antarctic Peninsula.Tristyn Garza, from the University of West Florida, pumps water samples
taken at different depths through an ultra-fine filter.Image:Scientists are seeing more plastic than they would expectA sample taken from
surface water in Borgen Bay on Anvers Island yielded several fibres and fragments of microplastic that were visible to the naked eye, but
samples studied under the microscope reveal many more."It's incredible," she said.This is how you survive in Antarctica "There's lots more
plastic than I was expecting to see
So far it is easily in the hundreds [of pieces] per litre of water, which is very sad because the places we are looking at are pristine and
untouched."You would not be expecting to see human influence, but so far there definitely has been."Sky News was also filming as a scientist
retrieved a fine-meshed net from Marguerite Bay, 250 miles further south.The net is used to sieve plankton, tiny marine plants, from the top
layer of water.Image:The microplastics are being found in one of the most pristine parts of the planetImage:The amount of plastic is putting
life in the Antarctic under even more stressBut Julian Blumenroeder, from the University of Heidelberg in Germany, also found in the net a
piece of hard green plastic, possibly from a bottle top."The problem with microplastic is that it's not just where lots of people live," he
said."It gets distributed on global ocean currents
It's in remote, pristine places
You can find it even here."He is studying whether plankton are consuming tiny pieces of plastic and then passing it up the food chain.How
climate change is melting AntarcticaBut Dave Barnes, a marine ecologist at BAS, said the amount of plastic in the South Atlantic was still
rising exponentially and that some of it is now making it through the strong currents that swirl around Antarctica.He said: "This is the
last frontier, the last place we can go where systems are natural
Yet plastic is pouring into Antarctica, and a lot of the organisms here take a very long time to process a meal."If most of that food is
full of tiny plastic fragments then they have wasted time processing a meal that not only isn't going to give them anything, but worse, will
still fill up their stomach so they can eat less next time
It's a big worry."Dr Barnes said Antarctica's marine life is already having to deal with the impact of climate change - rapidly warming
water, loss of sea ice and increasing winds."Life in the slow lane, as many people refer to Antarctic life, is suddenly in the fast lane of
stress," he said.The troubling discoveries came as Sky - the owner of Sky News - marked the third anniversary of its influential and
award-winning Ocean Rescue campaign.Since it launched, Sky Ocean Rescue has been committed to raising awareness of plastic pollution and
giving people easy ways to take action.This year Sky will have cut 1,000 tonnes of plastic from its business and supply chain, and the
company is also investing £25m in other firms dedicated to helping us give up plastic for good.
