Environment: Synthetic chemicals are widespread in marine ecosystems (Nature Geoscience)
17 March 2026
Human-made chemicals, such as pesticides and pharmaceuticals, can make up substantial proportions of dissolved organic matter in the ocean, reports a study in Nature Geoscience. Coastal areas are the worst affected, where up to one-fifth of dissolved organic matter is found to be made up of synthetic chemical compounds. The findings suggest that reliably measuring these compounds is feasible, opening the way to better understanding the impacts of these chemicals on marine ecosystems.
Synthetic chemicals produced for agricultural, industrial, and medical applications are finding their way into the oceans. Most attempts to investigate the scale of pollutants entering water systems have been regional, but an understanding of the distribution and persistence of these chemicals on a global scale has been limited.
Daniel Petras and colleagues collated 21 publicly available dissolved organic carbon datasets containing 2,315 seawater samples from coastal areas, coral reefs, and open ocean regions in the Pacific, Indian, and North Atlantic oceans. They directly identified 248 different humanmade chemicals in these samples with a median level of 2% of the detected signal intensity. However, samples taken near coastlines showed the highest median levels of chemicals (up to 20%), whereas open ocean samples showed much lower amounts (around 1%). Overall, chemicals became less abundant with increasing distance from land and greater water depth. More specifically, industrial chemicals — such as those used in plastics and personal care products — were found across all types of marine environments, while pesticides and pharmaceuticals were more common closer to shores.
These results demonstrate the widespread distribution of human-made chemicals in the oceans, in coastal areas and beyond. The authors note that the presence of industrial pollutants in the open ocean, far from their source, suggests a high degree of environmental persistence. They suggest that large-scale monitoring is needed to track the extent and detrimental impacts of chemical pollution in global marine environments.
- Analysis
- Published: 16 March 2026
Kalinski, JC.J., Pakkir Mohamed Shah, A.K., Ruiz Brandão da Costa, B. et al. Widespread presence of anthropogenic compounds in marine dissolved organic matter. Nat. Geosci. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-026-01928-z
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