Plastic rocks found budding in one of the most remote places in the world, four days by boat from Brazil

There are few places on Earth as isolated as Trindade, a volcanic island to which it takes up to four days arrive by boat from the coast of Brazil.

For this the geologist Fernanda Avelar Santos was speechless when he found in this small territory of the South Atlantic an ominous sign of the human impact on an uncontaminated landscape: rocks formed with plastic pollution floating in the ocean.

Avelar Santos first saw them in 2019, when he traveled to the island to develop his doctoral thesis on a completely different topic: landslides, erosion and more. “geological hazards”.

I was working near a protected nature reserve known as Parcel das Tartarugasthe largest endangered green turtle hatchery in the world, when he came across an outcrop of 12 meters of particular looking blue-green rocks.

Intrigued, she took dozens of samples to her lab.

Now, analyzing the material, Avelar Santos and his team have identified the rocks as… a new type of geological formationresult of merging the materials that the Earth has used to form rocks for billions of years with a new component: plastic garbage.

“Let’s finish like this the human now acts as a geological agentinfluencing processes that were previously completely natural, such as rock formation,” the scientist told AFP.

“It fits the idea of ​​the Anthropocene, which scientists are talking about a lot these days: the geological era in which humans influence the planet’s natural processes. This type of plastic, similar to rock, will be preserved in the geological record and it will mark the Anthropocene,” he added.

The discovery left her “sad” and “restless,” said Avelar Santos, a professor at the Federal University of Paranain southern Brazil.

The scientist describes Trindade as “paradise”: a beautiful tropical island of 9.2 km2 whose remoteness has made it a refuge for all kinds of species: seabirds, endemic fish, almost extinct crabs, green turtles.

The only human presence on the island is a chick Brazilian military base and a scientific research center.

It’s a “wonderful” site, he said, that has made “even more horrible to find something like thisand on one of the most ecologically important beaches,” he explained.

He returned to the island late last year to collect more specimens and investigate the phenomenon.

It found plastic formations similar to those previously reported in similar locations Hawaii, Great Britain, Italy and Japan since 2014.

But Trinity is the most remote place on the planet where they have been found so far, according to Avelar Santos.

And he fears that as rocks erode and microplastics seep into the environment, contamination in the food chain of the island will increase.

Their study, published last September by the journal Marine Pollution Bulletinclassified the new type of “rocks” found around the world into several types: “plastigglomerates”similar to sedimentary rocks; “pyroplasty”, similar to clastic rocks; and a previously unidentified type, “plastistones”similar to igneous rocks formed by lava flows.

‘Marine pollution is causing a paradigm shift in the concepts of rocks and sedimentary deposit formations,’ his team wrote.Human interventions are now so widespread that you have to question what is truly natural,” they explained.

The main ingredient in the rocks discovered by Santos was remains of fishing nets.

But ocean currents have also brought large quantities of bottles, household waste and other plastic debris to the island from around the world, said the geologist, who plans to make the subject his main field of research.

Trinity”It’s the most heavenly place I’ve ever seen“Seeing how vulnerable it is to the trash polluting our oceans shows how pervasive the problem is around the world,” Santos said.