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

The Seadragon crew posing with a "ghost net", a tangled mass of discarded, synthetic fishing line. Below, a recent account from Marcus, mid-Atlantic, with seas currently calm enough for a blog entry!

Day 7, September 2nd, 4:00 am
     Our days have settled into routines now.  We eat little, sleep a lot, and sit out for cold night watches. Clive and Dale, the skipper and first mate, alternate 12 hour shifts.  The other nine of us are in three teams taking 4 hour watches.  Between all of this we trawl for plastic.
     We've been using the high-speed trawl quite a bit. It's our new invention, which allows us to collect samples when the sailboat needs to cover ground at 8-10 knots.  Also, it's ideal for catching foraging fish, like myctophids. They can't outrun the net.   Years ago we caught the same fish in the North Pacific and found plastic particles in the stomachs of 35% of them.  We'll investigate the same phenomenon here.  What we've learned here is that the net must be pulled up every couple of hours, otherwise the fish get torn up by the turbulence in the net.

     


It's now 4am on Day 7.  The small trawl is in the water for an hour.  25 knots of wind all night long has died down to 10-15. After this sort of turbulence, we're not sure what we'll find - how do the wind and waves affect the distribution of plastic in the near surface waters?  Will the surface abundance of plastic decrease as we head away from the accumulation zone and toward Ascension Island?  There are many unknowns to explore....

In November, we'll cross the South Atlantic, from Rio to Cape Town, South Africa. We'll be looking deeper into the potential human health impacts, with Chelsea Rochman aboard, a PhD student from UC Davis and San Diego State studying plastics and marine wildlife. Applications are still open for potential expedition crew, contact us for more information.