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Graph of the Day: Distribution of plastic pollution in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans http://apocadocs.com/s.pl?1414984249
When marine ecologist Andres Cozar Cabanas and a team of researchers completed the first ever map of ocean trash, something didn't quite add up.
Their work, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, did find millions of pieces of plastic debris floating in five large subtropical gyres in the world's oceans. But plastic production has quadrupled since the 1980s, and wind, waves, and sun break all that plastic into tiny bits the size of rice grains. So there should have been a lot more plastic floating on the surface than the scientists found.
"Our observations show that large loads of plastic fragments, with sizes from microns to some millimeters, are unaccounted for in the surface loads," says Cozar, who teaches at the University of Cadiz in Spain, by e-mail. "But we don't know what this plastic is doing. The plastic is somewhere--in the ocean life, in the depths, or broken down into fine particles undetectable by nets."
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[Read more stories about:
plastic problems, plastic gyre]
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'Doc Michael says:
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'Tis the rime of the Plastic Mariner / who stoppeth one in four / 'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,/ what was all this waste for?'
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