You’ve probably heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – that vast concentration of plastic litter trapped by ocean currents in the Pacific Ocean. Now, researchers at the Woods Hole-based Sea Education Association have found a garbage patch of our own in the Atlantic.
The organization, which runs undergraduate sailing oceanography programs, has been towing nets in the western North Atlantic Ocean from Newfoundland to Venezuela for 22 years. Students have made more than 6,000 tows, pulling up nets to count marine organisms – and plastics – in them, and carefully recording the data.
Their data shows while a whopping 62 percent of the tows contained plastic, researchers consistently saw one area with the highest concentrations: Due east of Atlanta in the western Sargasso Sea.
The exact size of the patch is unknown but the plastic is likely gathering for the same reason the garbage is in the Pacific: Because of gyres, or rotating ocean currents that trap the waste. And while you may expect to see plastic bags and milk jugs floating in a garbage ocean dump, most of the plastic is in tiny bits, broken down by the ocean and elements. Some of the material marine debris but most are plastics that make up common household products from straws to milk jugs.
Read the complete story at The Boston Globe.