Science Results : Daily Update

Daily Update | Current SEA Research

June 20, 2010

By Giora Proskurowski

The past 24 hours have been a roller coaster of plastic. Yesterday morning we were in the thickest concentration of plastic of the voyage, tallying over 750 pieces in a single tow. The concentration that we found, approximately 375,000 pieces per square kilometer, was the sixth highest value that SEA has observed in the Atlantic over 22 years and more than 6100 tows.

The amount of plastic that we picked out from the net was disturbing, filling two of our sampling containers. For me, what made the haul so unsettling was the small size of the plastic pieces (most the size of this "O"). Thus, each piece represents a fraction of an object that has broken into thousands of tiny bits, many presumably even smaller than mesh of our sampling net. While there has been much outrage generated over the plastic-filled contents of bird stomachs, for me it is more troubling to imagine the harm that may be inflicted by smaller plastic fragments on the microscopic zooplankton and larval organisms that make up the base of the food chain.

While the afternoon tow had similarly high plastic concentrations, the subsequent evening and overnight stations yielded very low plastic concentrations. Or maybe the concentrations just seemed low, after spending hours and hours picking over the tows with high plastic concentrations; the lab processing flew by with the sparser nets. The past 24 hours have been a perfect example of the "patchiness" of ocean plastics, not because they form a patch that you can walk on, but because the distribution is uneven and occurs in patches.

On a more positive note, I want to wish my little girl, Alagna Eva, a happy second birthday. I wish I could have been there to sing to you and watch you blow out candles and get cake all over your face. Big hugs and kisses to you, your brother and your mama.