Hei,

1. Personally, there are three things that surprised me in polar science.

A) How many people actually are working in polar science. I thought it was far less, since it always sounded that only a few chosen once do this stuff. But there are actually many. I might be biased by being in Norway though and here is a strong polar focus.

B) How tough the environment is. Here I talk not about the Arctic, I talk about the research environment/ the academic work environment. It is apparently a very relevant topic, but still there is little funding or jobs.

C) How little respect people have for our work and the facts we produce. It is just that very often you run into people that don't trust the specialists. I mean, if a medical doctor says you have cancer, you trust that person right? If a doctor in bio/physics/geo tells you the earth has cancer, you ignore it and claim some wild stuff you heard from your neighbor is true? Pretty stunning.

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About the man made material, I guess you mostly mean plastics. However, the answers would be (mostly) true for chemicals and other materials too. It is pretty frightening to see, but so far, we know very little about it and the effects, especially in polar regions. So this is a bit tough to answer, since we don't even know how much is out there. Let's start at the micro scale.

The microbial world is probably not much affected directly by microplastic in the sense that they die. Here, microplastic could only provide a vector for the transport of microbes, but also fish and mollusk larvae etc. across the oceans. Many organisms and organism states prefer an attached lifestyle. This means they stick to stuff. This stuff floats around and degrades...or not if it is microplastic. So the microplastic carries these organisms around the world, which can lead to the spread of disease (unlikely) and invasive species (more likely).

On the other micro scale, this would be the uptake of microplastic into organisms. There, it is known that we find plastic in fish and crustaceans, which then find their way to some peoples tables. So there is an uptake into higher organisms. What the microplastic does there and how the effects are, is not well known (at least to me), but i am fairly sure it is not a beneficial effect. Alarming was the recent finding of nanoplastics in human blood. This means, it is at the core of where it can get and this for sure will not be good for us...or any other organism that has these particles in their blood.

On the macro scale, the classic example are sea birds, whos stomachs are full of plastic and they starve to death. Google "plastic and sea birds" and you get hundrets of pictures. And what is true for birds, it is true for all other marine critters. Fish, turtles, whales, all found with plastic in their stomachs. So this has a huge impact. Ghost nets would be the next higher category then, which are known to still fish and by that kill a lot of sea life. Unfortunately, relicts of the fishing industry are the most abundant plastic pieces found on the open ocean, so their impact is large. Sorry, I don't have numbers here, but this should be easy to google.

And on the global scale, this is happening everywhere, so it happens also in polar regions. And on a time scale, this will only get worse, since the production doesn't stop and plastic doesn't degrade. So it doesn't go away for many hundrets of years. Careful here, some companies claim it degrades, but ask pointy if it just becomes invisible (so microplastic) or if it is really degraded in its chemical compounds. Which in the end means, plastic accumulates and the effects will increase.

This is an excessive topic, so sorry for the rather short answer. For further studies, start here: https://ps.boell.org/en/plastic-atlas