Global Times

Study takes aim at plastic pollution

Scientists scour African waters to gauge impact on ocean

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Scientists on Saturday began a five- month mission to study how plastic pollution in Africa’s main rivers and climate change stresses are impacting microorgan­isms in the Atlantic Ocean, they announced.

The survey is being staged from the 33- year- old Tara research schooner which arrived in South Africa’s Cape Town on Friday ahead of the expedition up the West African coast.

The researcher­s will analyze how nutrients and pollution in major African rivers – the Congo, Orange, Gambia and Senegal – are affecting the Atlantic.

They will trace the sources of plastic pollution at river mouths, to understand their distributi­on and the types of material involved.

The research station will also cast nets that can go up to 1,000 meters below the ocean’s surface, to collect samples from ecosystems called “microbiome­s,” to be analyzed in labs on land. The data gathered will help answer key questions about the world’s oceans.

The researcher­s will also study the Benguela Current, which moves up from South Africa to the Namibian and Angolan coasts.

It pulls up cold water from the ocean depths in a process known as upwelling, bringing nutrients to the surface.

“You get more nutrients here than anywhere else in the world,” Emma Rocke, a 42- year- old research fellow at the University of Cape Town, who is working on the vessel, told AFP.

“Understand­ing that, and characteri­zing it at a microbiome level is something that hasn’t been done really ever, and more importantl­y, it’s not incorporat­ed in climate change models.”

She said the UN’s Intergover­nmental Panel on Climate Change reports published so far don’t consider the microbiome, “yet without it, ocean life would not exist.”

Marine biologists will later study an upwelling current off the Senegalese coast, the world’s third most powerful after Benguela and the PeruChile upwelling system.

The Tara vessel is on its 12th global mission and it involves 42 research institutio­ns around the world.

Tara Ocean Foundation executive director Romain Trouble, 46, said that this is the first time the ship has traversed the West African coast.

University of Pretoria’s microbial ecology and genome professor Thulani Makhalanya­ne, 37, will be focusing on the effect of agricultur­e and plastic pollution from African rivers.

“In coastal communitie­s, we expect to see evidence of a high degree of pollution,” said Makhalanya­ne. “We are also interested in other polluters that are perhaps not as well characteri­zed, things like antibiotic resistance genes.”

The vessel left its homeport of Lorient in France in December 2020 to embark on a 70,000- kilometer journey. Since then, it has traversed the coasts of Chile, Brazil and Argentina, as well as the Weddell Sea in Antarctica.

“You get more nutrients here than anywhere else in the world.”

Emma Rocke

Research fellow at the University of Cape Town

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