![]() This event led to a tsunami that swept coastal debris away from the shore and toward the United States. Researchers had previously found evidence that coastal species could survive in the open ocean after a 2011 earthquake struck off the coast of Japan. But the pollution spans about 610,000 square miles, and the plastic debris contained there weighs an estimated 79,000 metric tons.Įxamples of floating plastics collected in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre during The Ocean Cleanup’s 2018 expedition. A system of swirling ocean currents called a gyre pulls trash into a couple of different patches across the Pacific.Ĭontrary to the image that the term “garbage patch” may conjure, the site is not just a pile of massive chunks of trash- much of the debris is tiny pieces of plastic that the human eye cannot easily see. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch occupies water between North America’s west coast and Japan. “To find that many coastal species on a relatively small sample size was shocking,” Linsey Haram, a marine ecologist who conducted the research while at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, tells NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce. These out-of-place species survived alongside ocean-dwellers on the debris, the team reported last week in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution-and some even reproduced on the trash. Plastic debris swept through the seas by wind and waves has piled up in large areas of the North Pacific Ocean, collectively dubbed the “ Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”īut on this raft of trash in the open sea, researchers found something they did not expect: a surprisingly high number of marine plants and animals thought to live only on coasts.
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