Danielle Smith-Llera - Trash Vortex: How Plastic Pollution Is Choking the Worlds Oceans

Plastic trash in the

But locating the nearly invisible microplastics in the ocean takes computer modeling software and a lot of patience. Researchers sail into gyres with nets, called trawls, that drag behind their boats. The nets skim the surface, collecting microplastics. Researchers count the microplastics caught in the tiny mesh with the help of tweezers and sometimes with a microscope. Computer technicians combine new data and thousands of measurements of microplastics collected since the 1970s with information about currents to create maps of where microplastics could be floating.

But the maps are only guesses. Vast parts of the ocean have not been sampled, especially in the Southern Hemisphere. Whats more, floating plastic accounts for only 1 percent of the plastic that enters oceans, so much of plastics ocean journey remains a mystery. We must learn more about the pathway and ultimate fate of the missing plastic,Cozar Cabaas.

Currents and gyres circulate water and plastics around the worlds oceans.

that Ebbesmeyer believed was there.

Some plastic trash was easy to find. Moore observed that similar objects find each other in the middle of millions of square miles of seemingly empty ocean, and the ocean stitches them together, making a grotesque whole. We dive around this strange mass, avoiding the undulating tendrils of rope and net and deciding it could make a convincing sci-fi monster.plastic fragments.

The Alguita docked in Long Beach, California, for a summit with students and teachers about plastic pollution.

Using fine-meshed Moore wrote.

Moore hauled home barnacle- and algae-covered plastic garbage from the three-week voyage. He displayed it on the plankton.

I wasnt the first to be disturbed about plastic trash in the ocean, and I wasnt the first to study it, said Moore. But maybe I was the first to freak out about it.gyre the Worlds Largest Dump. The name Great Pacific Garbage Patch caught on.

The microplastics in Moores samples collected in the Pacific Ocean far outweighed the plankton.

The public did not fully understand what Moore had found. When he described the plastic-stricken area as being twice the size of Texas, people imagined an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on,

Charles Moore discovered an unusual rock on Hawaiis Kamilo Beach in 2006. When Canadian geologist Patricia Corcoran heard about it, she flew out to see it. The lump contained shells, coral, wood, and volcanic rock and sand, all fused together by great heat and plastic. She named it plastiglomerate and determined that it had been created by bonfires built by campers on the trash-strewn beach. Corcoran inspected the beachs larger plastic trash and found it had traveled from Russia and Asia, riding a gyres currents. Colorful microplastics mixed with grains of beach sand how did they get to this Hawaiian beach so far from the open sea?

Oceanographer Henderson Island in the south Pacific Ocean, for example, is remote and uninhabited, yet littered with 38 million pieces of plastic.

Like a chunk of plastiglomerate, todays beach sands hold history. Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere because there is no effective mechanism to break it down,Anthony Andrady.

Beaches littered with plastic and other types of trash are found around the world.

Seaglass and bits of ceramic and rusted metal also mix with beach sand to tell an older story. People have always been searching for the best materials to shape into the necessities and luxuries of everyday living. They learned to mold clay, hammer metal, and melt sand into glass. They shaved thin sheets of animal horns to make translucent panes for lanterns. These materials are plastic in the sense that they can be easily shaped. The English word plastic comes from the Greek word