Distributions of microplastics and larger anthropogenic debris in Norfolk Canyon, Baltimore Canyon, and the adjacent continental slope (Western North Atlantic Margin, U.S.A.)

>b<Micropollutants in the deep sea>/b<: influence of feeding mode on microplastic intake by benthic organisms and detection of persistent organic pollutants in biological and sediment samples

“…Maximum values observed elsewhere were especially high in the Great Australian Bight (Barrett et al, 2020), in the Arctic Ocean (Bergmann et al, 2017;Tekman et al, 2020), in the eastern Indian Ocean (Qi et al, 2022), in the northwest Pacific Ocean (Peng et al, 2018;Tsuchiya et al, 2023), and in the Mediterranean Sea (Kane et al, 2020), where particle abundance was up to 123 times higher than our findings. Abundance of MPs found here is higher than observed amounts in the north Atlantic Ocean (Jones et al, 2022;Nash et al, 2023), in the northwest Pacific Ocean (Fischer et al, 2015) and in the multi-location precursor studies by Van Cauwenberghe et al (2013) and Woodall et al (2014). Such a broad spectrum of different abundance records even within the same general location is to be expected, given differences in exact sampling coordinates, depth, year and technology, and presence of contamination procedures or polymer identification analysis in some of these studies.…”

Transport and accumulation of litter in submarine canyons: a geoscience perspective

“…Presence of litter is therefore primarily quantified as abundance (i.e., number of items), although there is a high variability in the units of measure adopted to report its density (see also Hernandez et al, 2022). Both abundance of litter per unit of area and/or abundance per linear distance are commonly used (Figure 1), along with other quantification approaches, such as abundance per time of observation (Schlining et al, 2013), per image frames (van den Beld et al, 2017;Zhong and Peng, 2021), frequency of occurrence (Moccia et al, 2019) or simple enumeration (Jones et al, 2022). The only attempt at mass estimates from video images was performed by Buhl-Mortensen and Buhl-Mortensen (2017), who assumed approximate weights for different items based on their composition.…”

“…The presence of microplastics in canyons is much less investigated than that of macrolitter, with only 4 studies reporting microplastics in seafloor sediments collected from 12 canyons around the world (Figure 1; Supplementary Material S1). Although all studies use density-based extraction methods, where lighter plastic particles are separated from sediment by mixing the sample with saturated solutions (Hidalgo-Ruz et al, 2012), the units of measure adopted to report microplastic concentrations are highly variable, encompassing the number of microparticles per unit of weight (Chen et al, 2020;Angiolillo et al, 2021), per unit of volume (Sanchez-Vidal et al, 2018) or per unit of area (Jones et al, 2022).…”

Instant deep sea debris detection for maneuverable underwater machines to build sustainable ocean using deep neural network

“…The deep sea is the ultimate concentration of land debris and environmental pollutants Zhang and Peng [2022]; Agostini et al [2021]. Debris Tracker is an open data citizen science movement that aims to track and prevent ocean plastic pollution, thereby addressing the global challenge through widespread awareness and action Jones et al [2022]. Unquestionably, deep sea debris can definitely break, smother, and even destroy sensitive ecosystems Cui et al [2020]; Cau et al [2019], so the sustainable development of the ocean requires an active treatment of marine litter Botero et al [2020]; Amon et al [2020].…”