Scientists have just completed a special adventure journey into the 'Pacific Giant Bunker' area.
During a survey on oceanic waste accumulation conducted by the Scripps Institute (SEAPLEX), the researchers obtained the first detailed images of floating plastic fragments floating in the distant ocean.
A scene that is not beautiful at all!
The New Horizon explorer ship of Scripps Institute left the port of San Diego on August 2, 2009, heading towards the North Pacific Ocean Gyre located 1,000 miles from the California coast, and returned on August 21.
Scientists who participated in this trip surveyed the amount and distribution of plastic waste, sampled for laboratory research and assessed the effects of plastic fragments on ocean life.
Prior to this study, people still did not know much about the size of ' trash' and potential threats to ocean life as well as the biological environment in the region.
This survey was conducted by the team from Scripps Institution of Oceanography with support from the National Science Foundation, the California Fisheries Foundation and the Kaisei project.
"SEAPLEX is an important field trip for researchers, and helps to better understand a hot issue of the oceans," said Linda Goad, director of the Foundation's Ocean Sciences field program. National Science, said. 'We hope that SEAPLEX will increase people's awareness of a growing problem.'
After six days at sea with the explorer ship, the researchers reached the first survey area on August 9.
The team used nets to collect debris from different deep shallow layers.'We aim to have the highest areas of plastic waste to see the problem,' said Miriam Goldstein, a leading scientist on the survey. 'We also look closely at everything, from phytoplankton to animal plankton or small fish that live in the middle water.'
Scientists found that in some areas it was easy to see a lot of plastic beads in blue water.
On August 11, they encountered a large net with many plastic trash and sea creatures clinging to it, they also found a few plastic bottles and barrels with many species of resident species, including those big oyster.
The following day, Pete Davison collected a few middle-water fish species, including Benthalbella dentata with eyes that could look upwards to observe prey swimming on the head, and small marine fish Tarletonbeania. crenularis has bright spots on the body that migrate from 700m deep into the water every day.
By the end of the journey, the researchers, though very interested in the waters, were really afraid of the amount of garbage here.
'Seeing so much plastic trash really makes us feel shocked,' Goldstein said. 'How can there be so much rubbish on an ocean lying thousands of miles from the land?'