Less ice and more shipping traffic has left the seafloor looking like the side of a New Jersey highway. John Metcalf, Feb 16, 2017. This post is part of a CityLab series on wastelands, and what we squander, discard, and fritter away.

“Humanity’s trash has near-universal dominion in the ocean. It swirls in the waves in immense “garbage patches,” drifts downward where it’s eaten by whales and turtles, and lands on the deepest sea floor to make it look like a landfill exploded on the moon. Even the places one might assume are pristine, such as the ice-covered Arctic Ocean, are littered with the detritus of human activity, as proven by the growth of a sixth garbage patch in the freezing Barents Sea. The latest evidence of worldwide junk infiltration comes from an observatory west of the Norwegian archipelago Svalbard, called HAUSGARTEN, where scientists have constructed a multiyear log of marine debris. In this remote location, more and more litter is appearing on the seabed—almost double the amount was found at one monitoring station in 2011 compared to 2002, they write in Deep Sea Research Part 1. Not only that, but it’s appearing in greater concentrations to the north, possibly due to climate change…”