A plastic “garbage patch” was found on Lake Baikal by an expedition studying the impact of plastic pollution on water reservoirs. The new discovery has already been compared with the Great Pacific garbage patch.
The amount of microplastics found in the cleanest lake on the planet is 10 times higher than in other regions. The spot covers an area of 1.6 million square kilometers and contains about 79,000 tons of plastic.
According to Mikhail Kolobov, senior researcher at the Department of General Ecology and Hydrobiology of the Faculty of Biology of the Moscow State University, plastic enters Lake Baikal along the Selenga River from Mongolia, as well as from coastal villages.
"For every square kilometer of the lake's surface there is a spot of microplastics the size of two A4 sheets," he said.
Biologists, ecologists, toxicologists and geneticists from 10 leading scientific institutions of Russia took part in the expedition, which worked as part of a large-scale ecomonitoring project.
Alex Shishlo, Editor in Chief of the European Bureau Rough& Polished
