Title : Microplastics and nanoplastics in Antartica. Consideration their impact on ecosystems and human and fauna health
Abstract:
The environment and ecosystems of the Antarctic Continent and its surrounding seas are influenced by phenomena such as atmospheric and oceanic circulation acting on a global scale, as well as by human activities or processes that cause physical or ecological changes at specific locations. These influences, or drivers of ecosystem change, can act in different ways in different regions, operate at different spatial scales and rates of change, and often interact with each other.
Antarctica is currently affected by the impacts of global forcing, understood as processes or variables that are larger in geographic scope than the Antarctic continent but significantly affect its conditions. Since 1970, changes in the ozone layer, changes in air circulation, in the Southern Annular Mode (SAM), and the effects of the El Niño phenomenon had notorious impacts on Antarctic ecosystems (Morley et al, 2020). Among the expected impacts of these global forcing effects are the loss of ice shelves and sea ice, glacier retreat, and ocean acidification and warming, among others (Morley et al, 2020).
Local forcings, defined as those influencing ecosystems in a given location or series of locations, that currently significantly impact their Antarctic ecosystems are pollution (marine and terrestrial), non-native species (NNS), tourism and other human visitation, recovery of previously exploited marine mammals, fisheries, and coastal changes due to ice loss and erosion caused by icebergs (Grant et al, 2021).
Pollution, both marine and terrestrial, is one of the local impacts that has grown in importance and concern in recent years. Within this, microplastic pollution has become a critical area of research based on the results that have been found in recent years. According to recent works this type of contaminants which have been detected in microplastics and nanoplastics have been found in pelagic waters (Isobe et al., 2017; Lacerda et al., 2019; Suaria et al., 2020), shallow marine sediments (Waller et al., 2017; Reed et al., 2018), benthic invertebrates (Sfriso et al., 2020), pelagic invertebrates (Jones-Williams et al., 2020), seals (Eriksson and Burton, 2003) and penguins (Bessa et al., 2019; Le Guen et al., 2020).
Recent atmospheric transport models indicate that Antarctica is a net importer of microplastics,and nanoplastics and that the flux of microplastics/nanoplastics from poorly managed plastic waste in the ocean that are transferred to the atmosphere at the Antarctic coast probably exceeds the anthropogenic sources of microplastics/ nanoplastics on the continent (Brahney et al., 2021). For all these reasons, there is growing concern about this environmental pressure in the Committee on Environmental Protection of the Antarctic Treaty and therefore the topic has been established among its priority lines of work and research.
The objective of this paper is to survey the state of the problem of plastic pollution (macro, micro or nanoplastics) in Antarctic ecosystems through a literature review of the studies carried out to establish potential risk scenarios for human health and possible future lines of research.
