Paper short abstract:

Instruments and protocols for monitoring marine plastics are not built for Newfoundland. This co-presentation outlines place-based techniques for doing marine plastic pollution research in an environment that undercuts the regularity, standardization, and predictability of the scientific method.

Paper long abstract:

There are plastics in every ocean in the world, but the instruments and protocols for monitoring them are not built for Newfoundland, an island at one of the four corners of the world in northeastern Canada. In fact, standardized scientific field practices that require something to happen every day, at regular intervals, or at the same point in the landscape do not work in Newfoundland. Because the weather is so extreme—to the point of shifting entire rocky shorelines and disappearing waterfalls—the anomalies and novel phenomena that we are warned about in the Anthropocene happen here as a matter of course (though not predictably). This co-presentation will outline some of the place-based science techniques and stories that have emerged from doing marine plastic pollution research in an environment that undercuts the regularity, standardization, and predictability of the scientific method.