Aloha one and all! First, I’d like to say thank you for following along on our journey through the Pacific - all of us on the ship are so excited to share these little blurbs with you.

First thing’s first: Happy Birthday, Dad!!! I hope it’s a wonderful, peaceful day that brings you near the water and that the cake is, undoubtedly, delicious.

“Fast Plastic:” Evaluating Fast Fashion and Wastewater as a Source for Marine Microplastics in the Rachel Carson NERR

Sea Education Association in the NEWS
“Microplastics research needs innovation, health focus”
By Marla Broadfoot
Environmental Factor
National Institutue of Environmental Health Sciences

Experts from the environmental science and health communities met Jan. 27-28 in Washington, D.C., to discuss microplastics, the tiny pieces of plastic now being detected throughout the environment. The workshop was organized by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) and sponsored by NIEHS.

Visitors to the Madden Center on SEA’s Woods Hole campus may have noticed an unusual 8-foot plexiglass tube, filled with synthetic saltwater, standing in the main stairwell. The tube is a rise velocity chamber, built by SEA volunteer Ethan Edson (C-247).

Thanks to a generous grant from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, researchers are taking practical steps to help curb ocean plastics pollution by sharing scientific research where it will do the most good!

SEA Semester in the NEWS
WBUR (Boston NPR)
“Millions Of Tons Of Plastic Are Dumped In The Ocean Every Year. We Don’t Know Where Most Of It Ends Up”

For nearly 50 years, the Sea Education Association has taken college students sailing on the ocean to study biology. During the weeks-long voyages, students drag a plankton net (imagine a super-long butterfly net) next to the ship twice a day and study what they catch.

SEA Semester in the NEWS
Middlebury Newsroom
“It’s an ‘Unfathomable’ Amount, Says Ocean Plastics Expert”

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – Around 2007, Kara Lavender Law began hearing public reports of a floating patch of garbage in the Pacific Ocean—a great island of trash, of cast-off plastic polluting the world’s waters.

SEA Semester in the NEWS
“BU Researchers Find Another Threat For Corals: Plastic”
WBUR
By Barbara Moran

“Boston University biologist Randi Rotjan has been studying coral reefs for more than a decade. A couple years ago, she started to notice tiny bits of plastic ‘in all of our samples from everywhere,’ she says. To understand how corals grow, she decided she was going to have to study how plastic gets into their bodies, how much is there and how it affects them.”

A great experience at SEASCape: SEA Science on the Cape, SEA’s high school summer program in Woods Hole, inspired one recent alumna to share what she learned about plastic pollution in the ocean, and in doing so, to give back to SEA!