A diver in Bali, Indonesia, has posted some rather shocking footage of the amount of trash in the ocean, highlighting the problem of plastic.
In a video taken on March 3 and posted the same day, Rich Horner filmed himself swimming underwater at Manta Point, Nusa Penida.
“The ocean currents brought us in a lovely gift of a slick of jellyfish, plankton, leaves, branches, fronds, sticks, etc.... Oh, and some plastic,” he wrote in the description for the video on YouTube and Facebook.
“Some plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic cups, plastic sheets, plastic buckets, plastic sachets, plastic straws, plastic baskets, plastic bags, more plastic bags, plastic, plastic, so much plastic!”
In an update the following day, he said the current had then taken away a lot of the plastic from the location, where manta rays use a cleaning station. But “sadly the plastic is continuing on its journey, off into the Indian Ocean,” he added.
While plastic can often be seen in the ocean, this amount of waste was said to be a particularly rare occurrence; Horner said he had “never seen [a cloud of plastic] anything like on this scale.”
It’s thought that this particularly large clump of plastic was due to the Indonesian Throughflow (ITF) current, which flows between Bali and Lombok. Plastic can be washed into the water through storm drains or during big rain showers.
It’s a shocking look at the amount of plastic we’re dumping into the oceans. By 2050, it’s estimated that plastic rubbish in the ocean will outweigh fish, with 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic already in the world’s waters.
(H/T: ABC News)
