Academics

April 10, 2012

SEA scientists and students are authors on a new publication in Geophysical Research Letters. Proskurowski. Morét-Ferguson and Law are SEA scientists, and Meyer did this work as an SEA alumnus while enrolled at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, FL.

Kukulka, T., G. Proskurowski, S. Morét-Ferguson, D.W. Meyer, and K.L. Law. The effects of wind mixing on the vertical distribution of buoyant plastic debris. GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 39, L07601, 6 PP., 2012, doi:10.1029/2012GL051116

March 2012

SEA Education Association received a National Science Foundation collaborative research grant “Microbial Interactions with Marine Plastic Debris: Diversity, Function, and Fate”. This 3 year project is being directed by Tracy Mincer (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), Linda Amaral-Zettler (Marine Biological Laboratory), and Erik Zettler (SEA). The research will use a combination of culturing, molecular biology, and microscope imaging to explore the diversity and function of the unique microbial community that develops on plastic marine debris. The field component of this proposal takes advantage of SEA’s ongoing plastic debris research and is built around independent projects by undergraduate students participating in SEA Semester research cruises in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Featured Research: Plastics at SEA

Click here to go to the Plastics at Sea North Atlantic Expedition website

Read the press reports about plastics research at SEA

Science Magazine

BBC News

National Geographic

Boston Globe's Green Blog

Since 1971 SEA students and faculty have been sailing and studying the oceans, towing nets to collect planktonic organisms from the surface waters. In addition to microscopic plankton, scientists have found these nets also collect small pieces of floating plastic debris. It was not long before this plastic "trash" was of scientific interest itself.

For more than 20 years SEA has been carefully measuring the abundance of plastic marine debris in the North Atlantic and Caribbean Sea on the sailing oceanographic research vessels SSVs Westward and Corwith Cramer, and also in the North and South Pacific since the arrival of the SSV Robert C. Seamans in 2001.

More than 6150 surface net tows have been carried out from Nova Scotia to the Caribbean Islands, collecting 64,000+ plastic pieces that have been handpicked from net samples. On cruises from Hawaii to the west coast of the U.S. samples have been collected in the much-popularized "Great Pacific Garbage Patch".

Plastic has emerged as a major contaminant in the ocean, yet the most basic questions about its sources, abundance, distribution, and fate in the open ocean remain largely unanswered.

Marine debris poses significant threats to marine life, such as:

• injury or death to large marine mammals due to entanglement by large debris
• ingestion of smaller plastic debris by seabirds, turtles, and even zooplankton
• transport of marine organisms to regions where they may be invasive
• plastic materials attracting some chemical pollutants from the ocean, while releasing other harmful compounds into the water

By understanding where in the ocean the plastic collects and the oceanographic reasons why, SEA is taking the first step in tackling these threats to living marine resources.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation.