Ocean Floor Littered With Plastic Pollution: CSIRO

In 1997, Captain Charles Moore was returning from a trans-Pacific race when he made a shocking discovery in a remote part of the ocean. Before him was a truly gigantic, floating mass of mostly plastic waste he dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Similar garbage patches are now known to exist in all five of the earth’s swirling gyres in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans—inescapable evidence of society’s unabated addition to plastic. But what is happening beneath the waves and swell on the ocean floor? A new world-first study, involving Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and Canada’s University of Toronto, suggests it’s more of the same—only worse....