As I drive down Highway 101, I’m passing world-famous surf break after world-famous surf break. I’m in Southern California to surf and meet up with some other environmentalist surfers that I’ve been in email contact with for ages but have never officially met.
It’s because of Charles Moore that you (hopefully) have heard about the enormous garbage patch in the Pacific. From the deck of Moore’s catamaran is where at least half the images you’ve seen of this marine eco-disaster have been taken.
The writer and environmentalist Stiv Wilson is on a mission to better understand how plastic ends up in the ocean, and what he—and the rest of us—can do about it.
Researchers are warning of a new blight on the ocean: a swirl of confetti-like plastic debris stretching over thousands of square miles (kilometers) in a remote expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.
Providing more proof that that floating plastic garbage is not confined to a single patch, marine researchers found an abundance of plastic pollution in every sample of ocean water they gathered on the first transatlantic voyage of its kind.
Fornecendo mais provas de que o lixo plástico flutuante não está confinado em uma única mancha, pesquisadores marinhos encontram abundância de poluição por plástico em cada amostra de água do oceano que eles recolheram na primeira travessia transatlântica desse tipo.
We collected 35 surface samples total, despite hurricanes that mandated a 600-mile gap in our research. All of them contained plastic. We collected some fish – not as many as we’d hoped to based on our Pacific Trawls, but the Atlantic is new territory for us.
“50 knots!” Anna yelled above the roar of wind and sea spray. It’s 3:00 AM and we’re on watch. Though the center is 800 miles from us, and slowly moving away, we are still feeling high winds along its edge.
Yesterday we found a windrow filled with patches of sargassum and plastic. Everything you could imagine finding in your local department store was bobbing in the sea, the EASTERN GARBAGE PATCH.
We’re less than a hundred miles from the predicted accumulation zone, the center of the Sargasso Sea. Yesterday we came across our first real glimpse of what we’ve seen in the North Pacific Gyre – the infamous “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”- only here in the North Atlantic.
We slow the sailboat down to 2 knots and trawl for 3 hours, skimming the surface for whatever floats. At 1:30am we pull in the net. Among the shredded plastic film, nurdles, and random pieces of plastic confetti, we’ve also nabbed a milk jug ring.
Cientistas marinhos encontraram fragmentos de plástico em todas as amostras de água do oceano obtidas na perna inicial da travessia do Projeto 5 Gyres (Giros), o primeiro estudo global sobre poluição marinha por plástico.
Marine scientists found plastic fragments in every sample of ocean water they gathered on the initial leg of the 5 Gyres Project, the first global study of plastic marine pollution.
My growing impression of Bermuda is its likeness to Hawaii. Both are in the path of their respective gyre currents – North Pacific Gyre vs. North Atlantic Gyre. Both carry a burden of trash from the shores of other nations. The trash even looks the same.
While here, the ship and crew are engaged in efforts to share our work with the community and to better understand how the island manages its own waste stream.
