Planet’s ocean-plastics problem detailed in 60-year data set

Data recorded by instruments known as continuous plankton recorders (CPRs) — which ships have collectively towed millions of kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean — show that the trackers have become entangled in large plastic objects, such as bags and fishing lines, roughly three times more often since 2000 than in preceding decades. This is the first time that researchers have demonstrated the rise in ocean plastics using a single, long-term data set, says Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. But since then, encounters with large plastic items, or macroplastics, have become much more common, rising through the 1980s and 1990s and peaking in the 2000s when the CPRs were becoming entangled in roughly 3% of tows (see ‘Plastic entanglements’).

Source: www.nature.com