Sustainable Seas Institute is proud to share that Md Shah Nawaz Arafin, a Ph.D. student at UNC Charlotte, presented “Microplastics Beneath the Ice: First Detection at the Geographic North Pole and Basin-Scale Polymer Transport across the Arctic Ocean” at the 2026 AIChE Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota (November 8 to 12).
The presentation reported results from surface and near-surface water collected at 20 stations between 64°N and 90°N during a September 2025 transpolar voyage from Svalbard to Nome, Alaska. Microplastics turned up at every station, including the geographic North Pole, making this the first reported surface microplastic measurement at 90°N. The talk also examined how polymer types vary across the Arctic basin and what those patterns reveal about how plastic pollution travels into the central Arctic Ocean.
This research connects directly to SSI’s mission of understanding contamination in the world’s oceans. Alongside our Caribbean sampling aboard R/V Dawn, the Arctic work helps build a picture of how microplastics and other persistent pollutants reach even the most remote waters on the planet.
Authors
Md Shah Nawaz Arafin; U.H. Pena, PhD; L. Feltner, PhD; Olya Keen, PhD; R.B. Tipton, PhD
The work is a collaboration between UNC Charlotte’s Performance Materials Laboratory and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Science in the Wild, and the Sustainable Seas Institute. See all of our work on the Publications page.
