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Monitoring marine litter from space
Every 60 seconds the equivalent of a lorry-load of plastic enters the global ocean. Where it goes after that remains largely unknown. But a new ESA Discovery study reported in Nature Communications has proven the concept of monitoring floating plastic litter using satellites.
In the paper the team assess the effectiveness of action plans against marine litter around Rome, identify a pollution hotspot related to shipping through the Egypt’s Suez Canal and put forward satellite data for guiding cleanup operations in Spain’s Bay of Biscay. The deployment of a sensor specifically dedicated to detect and identify floating objects one metre in size could also be useful for tasks such as oil spill monitoring, loss of cargo or even search and rescue at sea. Paolo Corradi, overseeing the project for ESA Discovery, comments: “The importance of these results and the applicability of this methodology can indeed be extended in a wider sense to the monitoring and characterisation of generic floating matter accumulations.
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