An ambitious but controversial plan to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch moves closer to reality this week, with the deployment of an ocean plastic cleanup boom off the coast of the Netherlands in the North Sea.
Two reports out this week paint an alarming future for Earth’s oceans. The first one, published by the Wold Economic Forum, finds that by 2050, the oceans will contain more plastic than fish by weight. The second, which appears in Nature Communications, reveals that our nets have raked in far more fish over the past…
A new study on seabirds has come to a disturbing conclusion: Their bellies are filled with plastic. Up to 90% of marine birds alive today may have ingested plastic, and by 2050, that number could be as high as 95%.
Garbage in the ocean is a big problem, but until now we didn't know how big. A study published today in Science drops a rough but still astounding estimate: 8 million metric tons per year. That's 20 to 2000 times more than what experts had estimated.
Things have gotten so bad with the human predilection for dumping plastic in the seas that, by the latest predictions, there are now more than five trillion pieces of plastic floating in our oceans.
On the quaint coast of Cornwall, near the town of Perranporth, there's a beach that's constantly covered in Lego. Tiny flippers, little plastic dragons, a brick here and there—these pieces have been washing ashore since a shipping accident in 1997 sent 4.8 million pieces into the sea nearby. And one-by-one, out they…
Last week, some strange news swept the science internet: Much of the plastic scientists expected to find on the ocean's surface is gone, and no one knows exactly where it is. Now the scientists behind the research have shared a first-of-its-kind map of ocean plastic with National Geographic--and it could be key to…
