‘Plastics, rising CO2 levels posing combined threat to marine environment’
An international team of researchers has found that the combined environmental threat of plastic pollution and ocean acidification are having significant impacts on species living in our oceans.
The study, published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin, found that after three weeks of being submerged in the ocean, the bacterial diversity on plastic bottles was twice as great as on samples collected from the surrounding seawater.
However, in areas of elevated carbon dioxide, a large number of taxonomic groups - including bacteria that play an important role in carbon cycling - were negatively impacted.