Algalita Marine Research Blog

We’ve found a beach in the Azores that receives the southern swell and wind from hurricanes that dominate the North Atlantic in winter, above the Sargasso Sea.  We caught the edge of one a couple of weeks ago, with gusts up to 50 knots and waves three stories tall.  But what else do these waves carry?  The Sargasso Sea is a sea without borders, gently spun by the clockwise currents of the Gulf Stream, North Atlantic Current, Canary Current and the Equatorial Current.  These currents brush by Europe and North America, and receive water from

rivers that flow into them.  They also carry plastic pollution.  

We’ve seen so much of it in the North Atlantic Gyre, but there’s more ashore. After three thousand miles and three islands, we’ve seen that one place where plastic pollution goes is on the beaches of island in the gyre.  This beach was littered with the usual suspects; light sticks, toothbrushes, buckets and crates, bottles, bottle caps, cigarette lighters, clothspins, and tattered fragments of plastic film.  Once again I’m struck with the fascination that this beach was

cleaned recently before the storm.  

What will they do with this plastic pollution?  The community of Horta will bury it on the island.  It’s a short term solution to a long term problem.  But what if this stuff had value?  What if individual products were worth something?  What if all of it were worth something by it’s weight, like we do for all metals?  Systems of recovery must be improved, and it can happen with legislation.  Currently, some states are proposing Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), which creates a post-consumer economic incentive to bring back products for money.  It works whenever the strategy is used.  For great information about EPR visit http://cleanproduction.org/Producer.Introduction.php.

Horta, Azores

The sight of land after weeks at sea is always exciting– but arriving in the Azores is especially so. And beating the next incoming storm was an added bonus.

At around 6:00 am, we heard the loud clanging of the “land ahoy” bell – a rusty handheld bell that originally belonged to – the Sea Dragon now uses it to signal land in sight. Skipper Clive hand steered us into the harbor masterfully, reading and riding the winds so that our crew didn’t have to tack once.

And there in front of us, framed by an incredibly bright, full rainbow, the Azores – we were all silenced. A soft, green landscape disappeared up into a cloudbank, patchworked with natural hedges dividing plots of land.

Anticipating landfall elicits a range of emotions on a journey like this. We’re all eager to walk freely, sleep in a stable bed, have a cold beer and a green salad, real coffee, and exercise. Thirteen grown adults sharing a small space certainly has its moments. At the same time, there is absolutely nothing that compares to the freedom and sense of space that crossing an ocean brings. Far from our work routines, cell phones, and internet, we spend hours on deck, staring out to sea, watching the stars, and musing on life’s mysteries. We will miss these peaceful marine meditations.

We tie off in the harbor, deal with customs, and head straight for Peter’s bar, a local sailors hangout. The bar is covered with sailing memorabilia – flags from around the world, scrimshaw, and old maps. We order the aforementioned beers, salads, and cappuccinos, and toast the success of our journey.

We collected 35 surface samples total, despite hurricanes that mandated a 600-mile gap in our research. All of them contained plastic. We collected some fish – not as many as we’d hoped to based on our Pacific Trawls, but the Atlantic is new territory for us. We found one incredible fish – a trigger living in a plastic bottle - a synthetic cage.  We collected tons of debris on all three islands. And we made some tremendous connections, in Bermuda and now the Azores, to collaborate with in the future.

Now, to explore the Azores!

Hello from aboard ORV Alguita in the Pacific Ocean! ORV stands for Oceanographic Research Vessel, and Alguita is the research vessel that has carried our research team to the most remote regions of the Pacific Ocean to study plastic pollution. Many of you have joined us on these voyages so I thought you would be interested to see what Alguita and crew are up to now.

Marcus and Anna have explained that most of the plastic pollution that they are finding in remote areas of the ocean found its way into the ocean through watersheds. Plastic litter on land flows directly out to sea when it rains. Today we traveled to the mouths of three major rivers here in Southern California: The Los Angeles, San Gabriel and Santa Ana Rivers to see if the large quantities of plastics entering the oceans at the river mouths are also entering the food chain through the mouths of fish. (The pic to the left is of the mouth of the Santa Ana River.)

The Azores are near.  We've only 150 miles to go, which we should cover by tomorrow morning.  Before the sun rose we threw our trawl in for one last sample.  Once again, plastic, but  also plenty of myctophid fish. We'll send this sample to the Algalita lab in California for stomach analysis.  When we did this in the North Pacific Gyre we found 1/3rd of the fish had ingested plastic fragments.

This trawl did not contain any sargassum.  There seemed to be more large fragments of plastic in this trawl, leading me to think that that sargassum mats floating in the North Atlantic Gyre serve a sieves for large fragments of plastic pollution.  In the absence of this floating seaweed the plastic fragments are more distributed across the sea.

We've trawled 35 times in 3,000 miles.  Tomorrow we will land on our third island in the North Atlantic Gyre.  We'll travel around the Azores to see what washes up on their shores and discover how they deal with plastic pollution.  Stay tuned...

1:45 am, our daily alarm clock sounds: “Marcus, Anna, your watch is up in 20 minutes...” Despite Marjolin’s sweet, gentle voice, we groan in protest. For several days, finding a safe position to fall asleep in without being thrown out of our bunks has been a losing battle. We’re all sleep deprived.

Aside from our skipper Clive, these are the heaviest seas any of us have seen. Simple tasks – opening cans of food, making coffee, showering, cleaning the kitchen – become enormous tests of balance. And not without casualties – spills, cuts, scrapes, and an entire cup of coffee dumped on a laptop, to name a few.

But as we come up on deck this morning, we’re greeted by relatively calm seas. Back in business! Crew begin smiling again, Joel and Lam bake fresh bread, we give the boat a serious 3-hour scrub to blasting music, and finally return to collecting samples. What a difference a day makes!

We haven’t had a chance to observe the subtle changes in the oceans surface for the last few days, distracted by massive waves. We now notice: no more floating patches of Sargassum. We wonder if we’re still in the “Atlantic garbage patch”.

A quick glance at our trawl answers our question: the same collection of small plastic fragments, 3 nurdles, and a few surprises:

“Look at that! 3 Portuguese Man of War!” Marcus picks one up by its inflated air bladder, careful to avoid the deceptively alluring, still stinging tentacles. A small piece of plastic is nestled amongst the bright blue tentacles. These potent creatures are actually comprised of a colony of different polyps, each with distinct functions, that work together. A very cool, cooperative survival tactic. Just keep your distance!

We’ll trawl one more time tonight, during our 10:00 watch – our 35th and final trawl. We’re now less than 300 miles from the Azores, and beginning to reflect on the last 6 weeks. The same questions echo from friends and crew: have we found what we expected? Is this similar to what we've seen in the North Pacific? What comes next? We'll touch on some of these tomorrow, now back to research!

“50 knots!” Anna yelled above the roar of wind and sea spray.  It’s 3:00 AM and we’re on watch.  Though the center is 800 miles from us, and slowly moving away, we are still feeling high winds along its edge.  A couple hundred miles south of us it’s calm, but we need to head northeast.  We’ve got a week to go before we reach the Azores.  We’re hoping the weather lightens up soon.

Two days ago we completed Trawl 33 at 28N,50W.  It was densely packed with sargassum and microplastic particles. Our two primary research goals have been accomplished. First, to document what’s floating on the sea surface in the middle of the North Atlantic Gyre.  Second, to collect enough samples to validate computer models that predict the eye of the gyre, where plastic pollution accumulates.

The next watch has taken over the helm.  We climb down from the deck soaked from seawater, while the next team ascends into chaos.  Sustained 40 knot winds create mountainous seas.  I don’t think we’ll put the trawl back in the sea anytime soon.

11:45 pm, just before midnight – Marcus, John, Mike and I are on watch from 10 till 2:00. With the moon moments from rising, the sky is still dark enough to get lost in an infinite display of stars. John snaps us out of our night-dreaming: “We’re here!!

Looking around, the view looks no different than yesterday – waves, whitecaps and wind in all directions. But we’ve just hit one of our major destination points – the center of the Sargasso Sea. According to a current modeling study by Nicolai Maximenko (LINK), this amorphous area is predicted to be the most dense accumulation zone, based on releasing drift buoys and tracking their travels. We’re hoping to see if the density of plastic in our samples fits in with this model.

But a major storm building 900 miles of us may limit our trawling time.

“Guys, this may be your last chance to trawl before the hurricane hits.” Clive, the skipper, has been poring over weather charts for hours, trying to find the best weather window for our sampling. Winds are already at 15-20 knots, but things are only going to get worse, so we go ahead, throw in our trawl, and return to star gazing for another three hours. The seas begin to rise ominously.

We’re glad we took the chance – under our headlamps, we can see a glittering of white plastic fragments nestled in the Sargassum.  We won’t know just how much though until we’re able to process these in our lab.

We haul up the trawl just in time – the winds have now picked up to a steady 25 knots. Hard to believe that early this morning, the seas were calm and glassy – the ocean is indeed unpredictable and fickle – never to be taken for granted. The power of the winds howling past our sails is tremendous, beautiful, and awe inspiring. We’re in for a few days of heavy weather!

We’re near the center of the Sargasso Sea at 28N,50W. It’s just about as far from land that you can get in the North Atlantic. Yesterday we found a windrow filled with patches of sargassum and plastic. Everything you could imagine finding in your local department store was bobbing in the sea, the EASTERN GARBAGE PATCH.

Then we came upon a bucket. Anna and John brought it aboard, only to find something violently wriggling inside. There was a trigger fish far larger than the opening of the bottle! Who know how long it had been in there, destined to be entombed there. We found plenty more pieces of plastic – toothbrush, crates, buckets, bottle caps, shoes, glove, plenty of fishing gear, and a boxing mouthpiece. “What are you going to do with the fish?” someone asked. I explained that one question we want to find out is, “Who is eating plastic bottles?” We would keep the fish for stomach analysis, but only if I promised not to waste the fillets, which we later ate for dinner. 

Trigger fish have a really bad overbite. The teeth of a trigger fish are designed for biting little things. They have small sharp teeth that can snatch a shrimp from the sargassum, or a barnacle from floating debris, or a triangular fragment off a plastic bottle. Looking closely at the bite marks on a plastic bottle, one can see two little dimples above the triangular bite. These are the two upper teeth. The lower teeth, oriented to form a sharp triangular edge, rip a fragment off the bottle. 

Though we haven’t observed this, the teeth seem to match the bite marks. There are no other fish present. I don’t think small birds or turtles have the power to be contenders for this feat either. I’m confident we’ve identified another species of fish mistaking our plastic waste for food. One more reason why we need to rethink how we use plastic.

Good Morning America aired a segment today regarding the plastic pollution problem, it features an interview with Marcus & Anna talking about 5 Gyres and their North Atlantic research!

We’re less than a hundred miles from the predicted accumulation zone, the center of the Sargasso Sea. Yesterday we came across our first real glimpse of what we’ve seen in the North Pacific Gyre – the infamous “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”- only here in the North Atlantic.

We had just pulled in our first trawl after 48 hours of laying low due to heavy winds. We can’t sample when storm winds pummel the oceans surface – suspended plastic is so close to the buoyancy of water that the slightest disturbance nudges it below the reach of our trawl. Forced to do nothing for 2 days but tend to boat duties, read, and entertain one another, we were all starting to climb the walls. And then we spotted the windrow, flanked by a group of dolphins dancing in our wake.

Stretching far across the horizon was a long chain of floating Sargassum mats, clumped together like huge wicker doormats. Embedded in each patch was a disturbing mosaic of plastic junk. “This looks more like the Pacific gyre”, commented Joel Paschal, who has also been on several long research voyages with Captain Moore. We grabbed our nets and began fishing furiously, amassing a pile of bottlecaps, shotgun shells, crates, toothbrushes, a boxer’s mouthpiece, and myriad unidentifiable chunks floated by, gently pulsating with the ocean’s currents. 

There is no doubt in our minds that the Pacific plastic plague is not an isolated phenomenon, but an International problem. We’ve seen plastic trash covering beaches in Bermuda, carried from the mainland by the Gulf Stream. We’ve seen broken down fragments in our trawls after sieving the ocean’s surface. We’ve now seen mini “islands” of plastic trash entangled in Sargassum. And yesterday afternoon, we saw the strangest thing yet, involving a large trigger fish and a plastic bottle. But that’s a story for tomorrow.....