SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Where Has All the Plastic Gone?
from ScienceNOW Daily News
Hundreds of kilometers off the coast of southern California lies the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vast soup of degraded plastic fragments. On the other side of the country, tiny flecks of floating plastic swim in a swath of seemingly pristine Atlantic Ocean at least two-thirds the size of the United States. Oceanographers have quantified trends in one of these "plastic soups" for the first time, and they've come to a surprising conclusion: The amount of plastic has remained steady for 2 decades despite a steep rise in industrial plastic production. That suggests that either people are keeping their trash on land or plastic is going to some unknown destination in the sea.
Since 1986, students on research sailing trips led by Sea Education Association (SEA) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, have been documenting plastic snagged in their plankton nets in the western North Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. The students and scientists tow a net behind their ship for about 2 kilometers, then use tweezers to pick out and hand-count trapped plastic pieces, most no larger than your pinky fingernail.
In their first publication of these data since the late 1980s, the SEA team reports that it found plastic in more than 60% of 6136 tows over 22 years. The levels are low close to shore but rise hundreds of kilometers off the coast between 22 and 38 degrees latitude (roughly from the Bahamas to Baltimore).
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