Sea filled with plastics
MAR 04, 2010
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.024130
Science News : Recent studies show that the oceans may hold more “garbage patches” of fine plastic flotsam than scientists realized and that the fragments extend well below the sea surface.Most of these items are the size of fingernail clippings or smaller. They are the wave-shattered remnants of items such as rubbish, abandoned fishing gear and floats from fishing nets and scientific instruments. These plastic bits are especially common in a region of the Pacific Ocean southwest of California that is sometimes called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.Recent cruises reveal that there’s more garbage in this patch than often meets the eye, oceanographer Giora Proskurowski of the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Mass., reported February 24 at the American Geophysical Union’s Ocean Sciences meeting.
© 2010 American Institute of Physics
