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Credit: Prof. Alan Deidun
That is the question that Prof. Alan Deidun, resident academic within the Department of Geosciences of the Faculty of Science, along with a cohort of high-profile co-authors, posed within a study recently published in the
Microplastics and Nanoplastics journal. Specifically, the study overviews a plethora of marine litter monitoring survey data available for different regions of the world ocean, as well as modelling data, in order to answer this compelling question.
The study, whose lead author is renowned litter researcher Dr Francois Galgani from IFREMER, concludes that, despite the well-known increase in the volume of plastics making their way to the marine domain from land, most studies indicate constant amounts of litter in coastal marine systems in recent years until 2019. For instance, collections of marine litter by Continuous Plankton Recorders showed relatively unchanged amounts trapped annually in the North East Atlantic since the year 2000, f