Scientists have discovered an area of the North Atlantic Ocean where plastic debris accumulates.

The region is said to compare with the well-documented “great Pacific garbage patch”.

Karen Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association told the BBC that the issue of plastics had been “largely ignored” in the Atlantic.

She announced the findings of a two-decade-long study at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, US.

The work is the conclusion of the longest and most extensive record of plastic marine debris in any ocean basin.

Scientists and students from the SEA collected plastic and marine debris in fine mesh nets that were towed behind a research vessel.

The nets dragged along were half-in and half-out of the water, picking up debris and small marine organisms from the sea surface.

The researchers carried out 6,100 tows in areas of the Caribbean and the North Atlantic – off the coast of the US. More than half of these expeditions revealed floating pieces of plastic on the water surface.

NeverVotedBush writes with an update to a story we discussed early this month about an enormous accumulation of garbage and plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean, a thousand miles off the coast of California. The team of scientists has now returned from their expedition to examine the area and say they “found much more debris than they expected.” The team will start running tests on the samples they retrieved, and they are preparing to visit another section of ocean they suspect will be full of trash. “The Scripps team hopes the samples they gathered during the trip nail down answers to questions of the trash’s environmental impact. Does eating plastic poison plankton? Is the ecosystem in trouble when new sea creatures hitchhike on the side of a water bottle? Plastics have entangled birds and turned up in the bellies of fish, and one paper cited by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates 100,000 marine mammals die trash-related deaths each year. The scientists hope their data gives clues as to the density and extent of marine debris, especially since the Great Pacific Garbage Patch may have company in the Southern Hemisphere, where scientists say the gyre is four times bigger. ‘We’re afraid at what we’re going to find in the South Gyre, but we’ve got to go there,’ said Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution.”

It swirls. It grows. It’s a massive, floating ‘garbage patch.’
Published: November 21, 2007

By Mark Frauenfelder

kosmik ray says: “A little-known island continent of floating toxic plastic garbage, TWICE the size of Texas, is growing in the pacific between Califormnia and Hawaii. Officially known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, until it can be taxed, U.S. officials will continue to ignore it. I heard of it once many years ago, but it apparently has been growing tenfold each decade since the 1950′s, and now consists of 80% plastic. It has also been called Gilligan’s Island, from the trashy TV sitcom that won’t go away.”

The enormous stew of trash – which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers – floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

…

The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s, said Chris Parry, public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco.

Petrified wood is actually a type of fossil. The original materials in the wood have been replaced by minerals. In the right circumstances, this can happen to wood today. It is possible that before microbial digestion of wood, this would have occurred more frequently.

That is really hard to imagine. Were the first forests like the mounds of diapers in landfills today – choking all the life under them?