Only 150 miles to go!!

Feb. 10 6pm position 37.20N,31.04W

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...

Answers to Participant Questions

Santa Monica High, CA asked how we get the internet. We’ve got a program on our computers called OCENS Mail, which allows you to check email by plugging a phone into your computer. But you need a phone. We use a satellite phone, which communicates to several satellites circling the earth. We could surf the net if we wanted to, but we usually only send emails and photos to our blog. At 3 bucks a minute for satellite time, there’s no time to waste!


Rolani, at George Washington High School in Guam, asked if we often find fish stuck in objects, like the trigger fish we found in a bottle last week. We’ve seen only a few examples of marine life interacting with plastic on this trip. We’ve seen plastic bottles chewed by fish, plastic particles stuck inside comb jellyfish, and another triggerfish hiding inside a floating piece of plastic pipe.

There is a larger issue of ingestion and entanglement that has been documented world wide. So far, 44% of seabird species have been found with plastic inside or entangled around their bodies. Also, 22 species of marine mammals, all sea turtle species, and a very long list of fish. Last night Joel, one of the crew members on the Sea Dragon, described working for NOAA to remove fishing nets from the Hawaiian Islands and finding whale bones and turtle skulls trapped in nets. Each of these examples of ingestion and entanglement are messages to us to be responsible for the end use of the materials we create. Perhaps you can share with us what is happening in Guam to deal with plastic pollution.

Giselle and Valerie from South Gate Middle School, CA asked how many pounds of plastic have we collected. We’re only skimming the surface of the ocean every hundred miles to collect whatever floats in those areas, so we’ve only got 10-15 pounds. We could have collected tons of plastic pollution on the beaches of Bermuda.

Our goal out here isn’t to clean up the Atlantic Ocean. We believe it’s impossible to clean it up once it enters the sea. Our goal is to document what’s out here by sampling in many places. We would like to see only marine life out here, but all of our samples contain plastic.

So, how do we clean it up? It has to begin on land. Much of the plastic pollution out here begins on land. We must find better ways to recover plastic waste, either with a higher return deposit for all kinds of waste. We can also pass laws to end the use of the plastic products that are poorly designed, like plastic bags, Styrofoam cups and products designed to be thrown away.


Silvia and Brandy from South Gate Middle School, CA asked about cleaning up the ocean. We believe that is impossible to do out here. It has to start on land. Imagine a trying to clean up a grain of rice out of a bathtub. That’s how spread out the plastic is. It’s little pieces of plastic everywhere. Now think how big of a bathtub the Atlantic Ocean is! There are billions of plastic fragments floating everywhere. They are hard to see, so we drag or nets across the surface to collect them.

Sometimes we find the big stuff floating with mats of seaweed. That’s been really shocking. We’ve found plastic buckets, crates, boots, shoes, bottle caps, plastic forks, bags, bottles, even half a toy babydoll. It’s impossible to clean up all this stuff. It has to happen on land.

I know you live near the Los Angeles River. Imagine a bottle cap floating down that river. If no one picks it up it will flow out to sea and stay there. Imagine a plastic bag blowing down the street. If now one picks it up it may fly into the ocean. Imagine a plastic fork in your school cafeteria that is dropped on the ground. If it rains, where does it go?

So what do we do on land to solve this problem? First we need to find a different material than plastic to make the products that are designed to be thrown away. We can pass laws to ban plastic bags and other single-use disposable items. We can also improve recovery methods by making recycling easier, or increasing the cash deposit on products. Already, Los Angeles does plenty of work to capture some trash flowing down the LA River using nets, or putting screens on storm drains, but it’s not enough. It’s going to take plenty of change to end the plastic plague in the world’s oceans, and I’m sure we can do it. What ideas do you have?


Juan from South Gate Middle School, CA asked what’s a knot? It’s a nautical term to measure speed, like the way we use miles per hour on land. One knot equals 1.15 miles per hour. And how did we end up in a hurricane? Well, we chose to do our research in the North Atlantic Ocean in winter. There are almost always hurricane-force storms here at this time of year. I don’t think I would like to be in one again. In fact, there’s another one headed our way in three days. Fortunately, we’ll arrive in the Azores by then.


Q: Hizers from Terra (forth grade) in San Francisco! I was wondering what percentage of things were found in the gyre, such as toys, food wrappers, packaging, or just things that don't work all together so we can avoid putting them in the ocean ourselves.


A: It looks like half of the large plastic objects we find come from the fishing industry, like fragments of fishing line, net, and floats. But there’s plenty of plastic pollution coming from land. We’ve found things like plastic toys, a boxers mouth piece, and plenty of broken buckets and crates. Most of what we find are tiny bits of plastic confetti that cannot be identified. Those pieces could have been plastic bottle caps, or knives and forks, pieces of buckets, toys, wrappers and packaging.

Keeping all plastic waste out of our watersheds is the best solution. It begins on land. It begins where you are. What kinds of solutions can you imagine to keep plastic out of the sea?