Prevalence of microplastics in the marine waters of Qatar.

Microplastics are firmly recognized as a ubiquitous and growing threat to marine biota and their associated marine habitats worldwide. The evidence of the prevalence of microplastics was documented for the first time in the marine waters of Qatar's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). An optimized and validated protocol was developed for the extraction of microplastics from plankton-rich seawater samples without loss of microplastic debris present and characterized using Attenuated Total Reflectance-Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy. In total 30 microplastic polymers have been identified with an average concentration of 0.71particlesm(-3) (range 0-3particlesm(-3)). Polypropylene, low density polyethylene, polyethylene, polystyrene, polyamide, polymethyl methacrylate, cellophane, and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene polymers were characterized with majority of the microplastics either granular shape, sizes ranging from 125μm to 1.82mm or fibrous with sizes from 150μm to 15.98mm. The microplastics are evident in areas where nearby anthropogenic activities, including oil-rig installations and shipping operations are present.

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  Marine Pollution Bulletin

• Publication date

  2016-10-15

• Fields of study

  Geography, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2016.06.108PMID 27389452
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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