Published: Just now
One new study from, among others, the Stockholm Resilience Center at Stockholm University shows that 170 thousand billion microplastic particles are floating around in the surface layer of the world’s oceans.
For the first time in almost ten years, scientists have made an overall estimate of the amount of microplastics in the world’s oceans. The study, which is published in the journal Plos One, is based on more than 11,000 measurements and shows that the amount of microplastic in the oceans is far greater than previously thought.
– The situation is much worse than we expected. In 2014, an estimate was made that there are more than five trillion plastic particles in the oceans. Now, less than ten years later, that figure is up to 170 trillion,” says researcher Patricia Villarrubia Gómez at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, one of the co-authors of the study.