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

(Blog post below from Leslie Moyer, at sea with 5 Gyres)

We’re two to three days out from our final destination – Papeete, Tahiti. At the tail end of the last leg of the South Pacific gyre expedition, this spot in our journey marks a nearness to a terminus of sorts.

While with the naked eye we haven’t been seeing as much plastic in our trawls in the South Pacific gyre as in the previous gyres we’ve visited, we have been seeing some – which means there is, in fact, plastic pollution in all 5 subtropical oceanic gyres. In total, we have 48 samples of the surface of this gyre. We’ve gotten a representative sample from the South Pacific gyre that we can use to publish. 5 Gyres is the first organization to conduct research on pelagic plastic pollution in the southern hemisphere, and we have completed transects of all 5 subtropical oceanic gyres; after 25,000 miles logged at sea, we consider this a major accomplishment. Were it not for our partner organizations and individuals who have contributed to our work, this research could not have been done.

We want to thank OceanCare for their sponsorship of three trawls for our work in the South Pacific gyre. The Swiss organization is committed to the conservation of marine mammals and the marine environment. With research and protection projects, environmental campaigns and determined efforts at establishing regulatory legislation at international conferences, OceanCare contributes to improving the condition of the world’s oceans and increasing ocean awareness globally. With a close alignment to many of the core values of our organization, we are delighted that OceanCare has partnered with 5 Gyres for our work in bringing awareness to plastic marine pollution.

This is not the ending point of our work by any means; now that we have baseline information from each of the gyres we have set out to study, we really have just begun...but it is cause for celebration once we reach landfall in Tahiti.