Plastic
Trash Altering Ocean Habitats, Scripps Study Shows
Scripps
Institution of Oceanography / University of California, San Diego
(May 8, 2012) A 100-fold
upsurge in human-produced plastic garbage in the ocean is altering habitats in
the marine environment, according to a new study led by a graduate student
researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.
In 2009 an
ambitious group of graduate students led the Scripps Environmental Accumulation
of Plastic Expedition (SEAPLEX) to the North Pacific Ocean Subtropical Gyre
aboard the Scripps research vessel New Horizon. During the voyage the
researchers, who concentrated their studies a thousand miles west of
California, documented an alarming amount of human-generated trash, mostly
broken down bits of plastic the size of a fingernail floating across thousands
of miles of open ocean.
At the time
the researchers didn't have a clear idea of how such trash might be impacting
the ocean environment, but a new study published in the May 9 online issue of
the journal Biology Letters reveals that plastic debris in the area popularly
known as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" has increased by 100 times
over in the past 40 years, leading to changes in the natural habitat of animals
such as the marine insect Halobates sericeus.