Ocean Garbage Patch Not Growing—Where's "Missing" Plastic?
The "soup" of plastic trash in the North Atlantic hasn't gotten thicker in two decades, says a new study that's puzzling ocean scientists.
Similar to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the North Atlantic garbage patch is somewhat like a region of plastic soup, although "soup implies you can see the vegetables," said study leader Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association (SEA) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
(See pictures of debris in the Texas-size Pacific "trash vortex.")
Instead, most of the Atlantic trash is in the form of tiny plastic bits—from bags and bottles blown off landfills or tossed into the sea—swirling in a still undefined region of open ocean hundreds of miles off the North American coast. (See
