First of Its Kind Map Reveals Extent of Ocean Plastic
There's less than expected on the surface. Scientists are trying to find where in the ocean it's gone.
When marine ecologist Andres Cozar Cabañas 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
