Microplastics are consumed by wildlife at high rates, with a recorded impact on at least 800 species, including half of the world’s sea turtles and an estimated 60% of all seabird species, a figure predicted to reach 99% by 2050. It can lodge itself onto or into sea life not meant to carry or eat it, which can get stuck inside their bodies or cause choking. While systems of measurement have not yet been established to unify the world’s research, in the GPGP, microplastics have been found to make up 94% of the pieces of plastic in the gyre.įree-roaming man-made plastic matter can devastate the earth. Microplastics - which, as they sound, are miniature pieces of plastic less than five millimeters long - have been found in human feces, as we eat them in fish and most table salts. “I had prepared myself to see vast tidelines of plastic floating on the surface, complete with entangled sea creatures, but what we actually found was a far different story.” Before the trip, he’d seen “images in the media which made look like a massive island you could walk on,” he tells Teen Vogue. Tavish Campbell was one of two aboard the Sunrise and tasked with filming underwater. To better visualize what that looks like below the surface, they also needed to send divers. On our first day of the 60-minute practice, 1,119 pieces were captured and cataloged. (The process, which feels endless, was oddly satisfying.) Members of the oceans campaign team then documented and packaged up the day’s tiny finds to be sent to partner scientists to study and ideally trace back to a particular product or brand. We’d sift the plastic pieces that were caught and pick them out of a tray and onto a gridded sheet to be counted and examined one by one, using tweezers. With the ship slowed down from its usual nine knots, the Greenpeace team spent an hour each day with a special trawl net lowered into the water. actions director for Greenpeace Katie Flynn-Jambeck holds up plastic recovered from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to show campaigners on board the Arctic Sunrise.
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