Deonie Allen is a research fellow in geography, earth and environmental sciences at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Allen is a Marie Currie global research fellow working with the University of Birmingham and the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Allen's research has focused on environmental pollution and pollution transport in urban and remote locations, specifically man-made pollutants, and how they influence environmental health, ecosystem function, sustainable and circular economy actions. Allen's current research focus is on microplastic pollution and its cyclic transport; in the air, water and soil/sediment.
Last summer, we travelled to the remote Arctic Hausgarten observatory area in the eastern Fram Strait (west of Svalbard, Norway) on a research ship. The samples we collected there included ice cores, sea water and ice algae from large packs of floating ice called ice floes. These form 1–2 meter thick “plates” of sea ice […]