Science / Medicine : Remote Atoll Littered With Trash

A discovery that a remote Pacific island is littered with an ugly carpet of 20th-Century rubbish has raised fears that the oceans are more polluted than was thought, Cambridge University zoologist Tim Benton reported last week in the British journal Nature.

Benton visited Ducie Atoll, which is 293 miles from Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific, the nearest inhabited island, and found nearly 1,000 pieces of junk on a 2.4-mile stretch of beach.

Benton said the rubbish included whiskey bottles, aerosol cans, light bulbs, dolls’ heads and a tinned meat pie, leaking but intact. “I walked along the shore and recorded the objects I saw,” Benton said. “In total I recorded 953 objects.”

Ducie Atoll is only visited by about 30 yachts a year so most of the junk must have been thrown off passing ships. “If so much rubbish is washed ashore on these small and extremely isolated islands, it makes one wonder just how much more is still floating on the surface of the oceans,” he said.