How Has the Pandemic Affected Research?

While I am grateful that the pandemic has not affected my ability to conduct my research too much, I realize that the media hardly highlights how the pandemic is affecting ocean health and pollution. You might remember from early on the pandemic that global ocean health was improving, as evidenced by the presence of dolphins in Italy. What you might not realize is that the evidence supporting the claim was rather misleading, and may have been manufactured. So how has the pandemic affected the oceans? A Forbes article published in May 2020 highlighted that some animals may be relieved of anthropogenic impacts because of travel and work restrictions. Nishan Degnarain (the author) identifies sea turtles and open ocean fishes as two groups of animals that saw reprieves owing to the lack of beach use and the long-term docking of fishing vessels. However, consider that while individuals have been reluctant to travel outside of the home they have relied on food delivery services for groceries and meals. A market research study on US food delivery during the pandemic found that 70% of food delivery service growth--approximately $19 billion--was due to the pandemic (Oblander & McCarthy, 2022).

Unfortunately, the increased reliance on food delivery worldwide has had tremendous effects on global plastics pollution. Two separate studies sought to assess how the pandemic has affected plastics waste. Peng et al. (2021) estimates that approximately 8 million tons of plastics have been generated globally during the pandemic, and that 25,000 tons have entered the ocean. Benson et al. (2021) estimates that 3.4 billion single-use plastics are disposed of daily during the pandemic and that the increased reliance on single-use plastics will overturn years of plastics reduction regulations and efforts. When single-use plastics enter the ocean they can degrade into microplastics within a few weeks though some plastics will take longer, depending on the polymer. The residence time of macroplastics in the ocean combined with the abundance of macroplastics that are currently entering the oceans suggest that microplastics pollution may be substantially worsened by the pandemic. There are groups of researchers currently trying to assess how concentrations of microplastics in the water column have changed over time, and luckily we have widespread measurements of seawater microplastics pollution to make comparisons across this time scale. We unfortunately do not have the data to conduct the same time series tracking for microplastics in the sediment. Sediment microplastics research tends to be patchy because of sampling effort and processing time, so current sediment research, like mine, may severely underestimate the scale of the problem.

I think an interesting idea for future work is a long-term sediment monitoring program using scuba and sediment coring, along with sedimentation data, to estimate microplastics abundance over time. We have the ability to do this type of monitoring to estimate previous biogeochemistry and to suggest the health of certain environments, and I think it might be possible to construct time series data using long sediment cores too. However, that's a research project for another time (or student).