5 Gyres - Understanding Plastic Pollution Through Exploration, Education, and Action

The Azores are near.  We've only 150 miles to go, which we should cover by tomorrow morning.  Before the sun rose we threw our trawl in for one last sample.  Once again, plastic, but  also plenty of myctophid fish. We'll send this sample to the Algalita lab in California for stomach analysis.  When we did this in the North Pacific Gyre we found 1/3rd of the fish had ingested plastic fragments.

This trawl did not contain any sargassum.  There seemed to be more large fragments of plastic in this trawl, leading me to think that that sargassum mats floating in the North Atlantic Gyre serve a sieves for large fragments of plastic pollution.  In the absence of this floating seaweed the plastic fragments are more distributed across the sea.

We've trawled 35 times in 3,000 miles.  Tomorrow we will land on our third island in the North Atlantic Gyre.  We'll travel around the Azores to see what washes up on their shores and discover how they deal with plastic pollution.  Stay tuned...