AWI-project: Publication in Marine Pollution Bulletin!

What a nice reward for all our work: We have cleaned several beaches in Spitsbergen within a project for the Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research. We weighed, counted and categorized the litter – and our data collection is now published in a scientific paper: at the Marine Pollution Bulletin!

 

You know the story, if you followed this blog: 2016  we collected lots of plastic, on SV Antigua, MV Plancius and SV Noorderlicht. Plastic, that is found on many of Spitzbergens beaches. Especially with the sailing vessels we reach often beaches that are rarely or even never visited by other vessels. In these places the pollution is very obvious – because nobody ever cleans anything there.

Together with Melanie Bergmann and Lars Gutow from Alfred-Wegener-Institute I have developed a project, for which we collected litter together with guests. 2017 we continued with the project, with an even finer data collection. Many guests of the ships on which I work, have contributed to this project, with quite some enthusiasm. It is not really a nice work, to collect and even sort stinky and smeary litter from icy beaches. The bigger is the gratitude to all who helped.

The data from 2016 are now published in the  Marine Pollution Bulletin.

You can read the paper here:

Citizen scientists reveal: Marine litter pollutes Arctic beaches and affects wildlife