‘Darwin’s islands’ littered with plastic refuse
Scientists estimate that Australian atoll is now covered by more than 414million pieces of debris
THE island chain that inspired Charles Darwin’s first major scientific paper is now drowning in a sea of plastic, alarming images show.
Australia’s Cocos (Keeling) Islands, a ring-shaped outcrop in the eastern Indian Ocean, was visited by Darwin and the crew of HMS Beagle in 1836, and helped him develop the theory that it was the gradual sinking of volcanic islands which allowed circular coral reefs, or atolls, to form. On his return to England he published his first major paper on the theory, and in his 1839 work The Voyage of the Beagle the pristine sands and palm trees of Cocos were pictured in the drawing entitled “Inside an atoll”. Today the islands are littered with refuse, with scientists from the University of Tasmania estimating there are now 414million pieces of debris on the beaches.
A study led by Dr Jennifer Lavers, a marine biologist, published in the journal Scientific Reports, found 238tons of plastic, including 977,000shoes and 373,000 toothbrushes. The researchers estimate that more than 380 million of the items are buried up to 4in below the surface, 26 times greater than the amount visible on the beaches. The remote islands have a population of just 529, proving that most of the debris is being carried in by ocean currents from more populated areas of the world.
“Plastic pollution is now ubiquitous in our oceans, and remote islands are an ideal place to get an objective view of the volume of plastic debris now circling the globe,” Dr Lavers said. “Our estimate is conservative, as we only sampled down to a depth of 10 centimetres and couldn’t access some beaches that are known debris ‘hotspots’.
“Islands such as these are like canaries in a coal mine and it’s increasingly urgent that we act on the warnings they are giving us,” said Dr Lavers said.
Darwin spent 12 days on the islands, exploring the archipelago and collecting geological, botanical and animal specimens including corals, shells, rocks, plants, fish, insects and crabs which he took back to England.
Some of these can be viewed at the British Museum and Natural History Museum in London.
Writing in his diary, he said: “The shallow, clear and still water of the lagoon, resting in its greater part of white sand, is, when illuminated by a vertical sun, of the most vivid green. This brilliant expanse, several miles in width, is on all sides divided by a line of snowwhite breakers from the dark heaving waters, or from the blue vault of heaven by the strips of land crowned by the level tops of the cocoa-nut trees.” The Tasmanian researchers also discovered in 2017 that the remote Henderson Island in the South Pacific had the highest density of plastic debris anywhere on Earth.
While the density of plastic debris on Darwin’s islands is lower, the total volume
‘Islands such as these are like canaries in a coal mine and it’s increasingly urgent that we act on the warnings’
dwarfs the 38 million pieces weighing 17tons found there.
Dr Annett Finger, the co-author from Victoria University, said: “Cleaning beaches once they are polluted with plastic is time consuming, costly, and needs to be regularly repeated as thousands of new pieces of plastic wash up each day.
“The only viable solution is to reduce plastic production and consumption while improving waste management to stop this material entering our oceans in the first place.”