Because plastic garbage can drift to the farthest waters with ocean currents, a group of scientists found plastic particles in the ice cores drilled in the Arctic, which shows that plastic has reached the most remote waters on earth as a pollutant. Lancaster Bay is an isolated water area, which is considered to be relatively less affected by plastic pollution carried by ocean currents. However, among the sealed substances in the ice core, they found plastic. In addition, those ice cores have been formed for at least a year, which means that pollutants may drift from waters closer to the North Pole to Lancaster Bay.

A Swedish icebreaker took the researchers slowly into the northwest channel connecting the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean and carried out their 18-day research mission. Researchers set foot on the ice in lancaster sound, and drilled 18 ice cores with the longest length of 2 meters in four different locations ... seemingly flawless Arctic glaciers are actually full of plastic particles and fibers visible to the naked eye! This shows that plastic, as a pollutant, has reached the most remote waters on earth.

Sweden's "Oden" icebreaker, with a team led by American scientists, sailed along the Northwest Passage connecting the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean on July 18, and invested in the "Northwest Passage" exploration project for 18 days to investigate the impact of man-made climate change on the Arctic. Scientists landed on the floating ice by helicopter, and drilled 18 ice cores with the longest length of 2 meters at four locations in Lancaster Bay, in which plastic particles and fibers with different shapes and sizes were visible to the naked eye. Team member Jacob Strock, a graduate student at the University of Rhode Island in the United States, said that he and his colleagues spent several weeks observing the seemingly primitive white sea ice on the sea surface, but "when they looked closely, they found that all the ice was very, very obviously polluted".

Braez Luce, an oceanographer and project chief scientist at the University of Rhode Island in the United States, said that the plastic particles in the ice core are unusual in quantity and size. The United Nations estimates that up to now, 654.38 billion tons of plastics have been dumped into the global ocean.