With plastics creating more marine snow, microbes have more space to colonize, which in turn makes organic carbon. This could seed more carbon into the deep ocean and alter the ocean's biological pump that helps regulate the climate, altering our planet's age-old cooling process.
John,
Scientists and environmentalists refer to it as "marine snow": A non-stop shower of waste and dying material sinking from the ocean surface into the sea depths. But now, microplastics have infiltrated the marine snow, contaminating deep-sea food webs and the ocean's carbon cycles.
Plastic in the ocean is constantly degraded into splinters and shreds of microplastics. As microplastics permeate marine snow, it becomes rapidly colonized by microbes.
With plastics creating more marine snow, microbes have more space to colonize, which in turn makes organic carbon. This could seed more carbon into the deep ocean and alter the ocean's biological pump that helps regulate the climate, altering our planet's age-old cooling process.
Microbes are a foundational link in a food web, and with plastic's buoyancy slowing their descent into the ocean's depth, they become more available for mid-depth predators to consume, starving species that live further down. Scientists have called microplastics a "diet pill" for deep sea marine life.
Marine snow is a significant aspect of connecting food webs across the ocean. And now that tens of millions of tons of plastic enter our ocean annually, the effects are widespread.
And as bad as the problem is at the surface where we can see with our own eyes the effects of ocean plastic pollution, it is far worse at the ocean floor. A recent scientific model estimates that 99.8 percent of plastic entering the oceans since 1950 has sunk below the first few hundred feet of the sea. Additionally, scientists find 10,000 times more microplastics on the seafloor than contaminated surface waters.
John, microplastics in marine snow is another existential threat to our existence. The new reports and latest studies highlight the importance of ending our dependency on plastics and cleaning up our oceans.
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