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

We trawled 15 times across the surface of the North Atlantic Gyre in the 2000 miles it took to sail from Bermuda to the Azores.  We even survived a hurricane, but still kept collecting samples.  But by March 1st we learned they were lost. The ice had certainly melted, so the fish tissues were gone.  After two weeks they appeared in LAX.  Though the fish turned into putrid soup, the plastic particles inside each sample are intact.  They are now in the Algalita lab being analyzed. 

Analysis of a gyre sample can take up to a week as lab staff manually remove and categorize each piece of plastic according to size, type and color.  In the end we'll have a good snapshot of plastic pollution in the North Atlantic Gyre.  Though others have studied the western edge of this gyre for decades, no one has ventured eastward beyond the center of the Sargasso Sea.  We did just that and found plastic debris in every trawl.