Program

Plastic pollution in the marine/ocean is a global concern because their micro-sized particles can be transferred into marine food-web through ingestion by organisms in various trophic levels and hazardous additives can be released into surrounding environment. Already, their presence has been found in various taxa including zooplankton, benthic crustacean, fishes, seabirds, and mammals, as well as in worldwide compartments such as seawater and sediment of coastal region, deep-sea sediment of open sea, seawater and sea-ice of Arctic region. As a consequence of study results, a big gap was found between the amounts entering the ocean and found in global oceanic water (Cózar et al., 2014; Jambeck et al., 2015). Some mechanisms including ‘longer residence in freshwater system’, ‘sinking to deep sea sediment’, ‘biological ingestion’, and ‘unexpectedly fast degradation in environments’ are suggested as possible explanation. Additionally, the Arctic region is proposed to be a global sinker of MPs, based on greater levels found in sea-ice cores of the Arctic Ocean than those reported in gyres (Obbard et al., 2014). The presence of MPs in Arctic polar waters in Svalbard, Norway was also observed (Lusher et al., 2015). However, the Atlantic Ocean water may not be sole vector to transport MPs to the Arctic Ocean. It is known that northeastern countries are major contributor to plastics entering the ocean and then northeastern marginal sea is a global hot spot for MP pollution. Considering Northeastern Pacific region as a global hot-spot of MPs, the direction of prevailing current moving them, and relative great levels in the Pacific Gyre waters, substantial amounts of MPs may enter the Arctic Ocean through the Bering strait. However, field studies have not yet ascertained the transport across the strait and the distribution within polar waters connected with North Pacific Ocean. We performed the first surveillance in 2016 with a 5-year expedition plan to elucidate the distribution and fate of microplastics in the Arctic polar environment including surface water, sea-ice core, bed- and settling sediment, and so on. All samples were or will be collected during an oceanographic and geophysical cruise on-board during the Korean research ice breaker R/V ARAON expedition, covering Bering Strait, Chukchi Sea, East Siberian Sea, and Beaufort Sea. In this symposium, we will present the preliminary result of the 2016 Expedition (ARA07B; August 5^th and August 22th in 2016).