Study finds Monterey Bay littered with tiny bit of plastic
SAN JOSE — Monterey Bay has a reputation as one of America’s most pristine ocean environments: The bay is a national marine sanctuary and far away from heavy industry.
But a groundbreaking study published Thursday has found levels of plastic pollution in the water similar to those found in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The pollution is made up of trillions of tiny bits of debris, roughly the size of a grain of rice or smaller, floating from near the surface to thousands of feet underwater. The particles are being consumed by small ocean animals, the study found.
“It’s incredibly sobering,” said Kyle Van Houtan, chief scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
“This is not a place you expect to find a lot of plastic, a lot of toxics,” he said. “What it shows is the pervasive effect of the human ability to transform the oceans into a non-natural state, even in a place where we have a lot of protections.”
The study, a joint effort by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Monterey Bay Aquarium, is the first to document how plastic pollution in the ocean is widespread, and exists not just at the surface but in the deep waters as well. The report was published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.
“Our findings buttress a growing body of scientific evidence pointing to the waters and animals of the deep sea, Earth’s largest habitat, as the biggest repository of small plastic debris,” said Anela Choy, a postdoctoral fellow at the institute and the lead author of the paper.
Choy and other researchers used unmanned underwater robots to collect water samples near the shoreline at Moss Landing Harbor and roughly 15 miles out in the open ocean and at depths of as much as 3,000 feet below the surface.
They found concentrations of plastic particles at roughly 2 particles per cubic meter near the surface, and as high as 10 to 14 particles per cubic meter roughly 1,000 to 2,000 feet underwater.
By comparison, plastic pieces in the famous Pacific Garbage Patch further west in the remote Pacific Ocean north of Hawaii have been found near the surface at about 10 particles per cubic meter.
The Pacific Garbage Patch, an area where ocean currents come together to concentrate litter and other debris, is not a giant floating collection of large plastic objects. Rather, it is a concentration of tiny pieces of confetti-like plastic that have been broken down in the ocean over years.