Darwin's paradise contaminated by marine debris. Understanding their sources and accumulation dynamics.☆

Understanding the Sources of Marine Litter in Remote Islands: The Galapagos Islands as a Case Study

“…Remote islands located far from major litter sources, with limited human activities and cleaning efforts, can provide baseline levels of diffusive marine litter contamination (Gennip et al, 2019;Sánchez-García and Sanz-Lázaro, 2023). Still, some of the highest densities of marine litter have been reported in remote islands, not only near oceanic convergence zones (730 items⋅100 m − 1 , 500 kg⋅100 m − 1 ; in Inaccesible Island) (Ryan et al, 2019), but in islands situated far away from these garbage patches (e.g.…”