Even the Arctic can’t escape plastic pollution. Scientists gathered ice samples from five distinct regions in the Arctic Ocean, and those samples contained sometimes over 12,000 microplastic particles per liter of ice – a record-breaking amount. All told, they uncovered 17 different kinds of plastic, including paints and packaging. A team of 9 scientists at Alfred Wegener Institute recorded record levels of microplastics, or plastic fragments between a few micrometers to under five millimeters big, in sea ice collected in the Arctic.