The Arctic is a dead end for floating plastic waste dumped in the Atlantic Ocean off Europe and the United States and swept north by ocean currents to a polar graveyard, scientists said on Wednesday.
Levels of plastic found east of Greenland and in the Barents Sea off Norway and Russia were far higher than expected for the sparsely populated regions, according to the report showing how man-made pollution extends even to remote parts of the globe.
"The northeastern Atlantic sector of the Arctic Ocean appeared as a dead end for the surface transport of plastic pollution," the authors wrote in the open access journal Science Advances.