It’s been a while since I last wrote anything on here. Lots of other things have been distracting me (I’ll write more about these soon!), but I have had a bit of time to think about microplastics in caves a bit more since my blog post introducing the concept in May. Hopefully that summed up why we need to do some work to understand the problem of microplastic pollution and why the cave environment would be an interesting area of future study. Some questions I suggested could be answered by surveying microplastic prevalence in caves were:

Yes, this is nearly 3 years too late, but better late than never and it has given me something interesting to do.

In 1907, the first synthetic plastic, Bakelite, was produced. That same year, Otto Krummel published what might be the first stand-alone map of the Marianas Trench, the deepest point on Earth’s surface. When plastic started to be produced on industrial scales in the 1950s, the first ascent of Everest was made. A decade later on January 23rd 1960, Jacques Picard and Don Walsh made a historic first visit to the black depths of Marianas. In that decade, global plastic production had reached 47 million tonnes in total (8 million in the year 1960). Over 60 years have now passed since then, and the ocean waters into which Picard and Walsh descended have been unquestionably altered by the now nearly 8 billion tonnes of plastic that preside on our planet today.

It all started, as is often the case, at a party. The party in question was the annual CHECC forum/piss-up in late November, which is always one of my favourite weekends of the year and generally a time when I like to let go. During the height of Friday night’s antics, a brief lull saw a few of us assembled outside considering our next moves. We all commented that K Brook wasn’t here, and that if he had been he would certainly have been performing splendidly by now.

So, after some slight hitches, here is the first real blog post. (I accidentally deleted the nearly-finished version while I was trying to work out how to embed instagram posts - Grrrrr!!! I did at least manage to do that in the end, with the help of this shell script and a lot of fruitless googling.)

I’ve been meaning to do this for some time, but have only just had the opportunity to devote myself to the task (thanks to COVID-19 enabling me to ignore what I’m actually meant to be doing). So here is my blog, inventively named after me, wobrotson.