YUCK! 270,000 tons of garbage is sitting in the ocean

For decades, the international scientific communities have known-and warned-about the growing amount of plastic trash in the world's oceans. Since the 1990s it has been known that masses of plastic can clump up in the ocean and form islands of debris.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - A new study published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, revealed that there may be ten times as much plastic debris in the ocean as scientists had previously accepted.

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On December 10, researchers said that there may be nearly 269,000 tons of plastic pollution in the ocean.

This debris, and these debris fields that form, are often found around the coasts, but farther out from shore the plastic can get picked up into gyres-large whirlpools in the ocean-and broken up into tiny particles that are then eaten by small animals and enter the food chains, where they cause havoc on the oceanic ecosystems.

"Our findings show that the garbage patches in the middle of the five subtropical gyres are not the final resting places for the world's floating plastic trash," said Marcus Eriksen, the author of the study and director of research for the Five Gyres Institute.

"The endgame for micro-plastic is interactions with entire ocean ecosystems."

The study was conducted by six nations, and compiled information from 24 expeditions that occurred around the world from 2007 to 2013.

The expeditions used nets to collect the microscopic plastic particles, while more direct visual surveys were used in collecting information on the larger coastal debris.

With this information the team was able to develop a model that accurately counted the approximate tonnage of plastic in the oceans. Of these tiny plastic particles, at least 5.25 trillion exist.

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