DECRYPTION – Very small waste has been found in large quantities around the islands of the highly protected archipelago of Palau.
Visible to the naked eye for the biggest, microplastics do not only pollute the most frequented coasts of the oceans. This waste is also present in the water and sand of remote areas of the Palau archipelago, located in Micronesia, in the western Pacific Ocean. This is the sad observation made by researchers from the Scientific Center of Monaco (CSM) and the Palau International Center for Coral Research (PIPRC), in a publication in the journal PLOS One. Plastic pollution that adds to the list of threats to coral reefs, pillars of marine biodiversity. This discovery is all the more worrying as the archipelago is isolated in the middle of the Pacific, and as the small Republic has already taken significant conservation measures to preserve its exceptional underwater environment.
Microplastics range in size from 5 mm to 100 micrometers. They come from the degradation of plastic waste from over…
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