by Rebecca Bowe
This jar contains the debris picked up by a manta trawler, a device that skims the surface of the ocean, in a single hour.
The tall ship Kaisei has returned from its month-long voyage to the plastic garbage vortex swirling through the North Pacific Gyre, and the preliminary findings of the ocean researchers are something of a wake-up call.
“We trawled thousands of miles, and we tested surface samples across the whole distance,” said Doug Woodring, cofounder of Project Kaisei, created in May of 2008 to study and address the growing problem of marine debris. “Every single sample came up with plastic.”
“We barely scratched the surface,” added Woodring, who was speaking at a press conference at San Francisco’s South Beach Harbor on Sept. 1.
Project Kaisei is a project of the Ocean Voyages Institute, a Sausalito-based nonprofit founded in 1979. The voyage was conducted in partnership with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, which sent a second research vessel, called the New Horizon, to collect samples of the marine debris for further study. The voyage was just the beginning of the mission, and now Scripps scientists have a good six months of lab analysis ahead to try and better understand the impact of plastic on the marine environment.