Chances are you’ve heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the vast mass of floating debris midway between Hawaii and California that is twice the size of Texas. Although many media stories conjure up a chunky soup of bottles and tires, it is mostly an unstrained consomm\u00e9 of small bits of floating plastic. And it isn’t the only one. A similar accumulation of plastic particles\u2014which include weathered fishing line, Styrofoam, wrappers, and raw resin pellets\u2014has shown up in the North Atlantic Ocean. But the potential harm to marine life is far from clear.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Most of the floating debris is small enough that it’s difficult to determine what happens to it. It’s also small enough to be ingested by marine life low on the food chain. Further study is necessary to understand what is happening to plastic particulate and how much of its chemicals are absorbed into animal tissue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“The ocean is a dynamic and rapidly evolving environment, a long-appreciated truth which becomes increasingly apparent as we observe it ever more carefully.” Last month, Science magazine ran a\u00a0special issue\u00a0on ocean science and ocean conservation. We especially liked the updates on new technologies for studying the ocean. Two such examples are buoys and fiber-optic cables. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[211,210],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2016","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-environmental-conservation","7":"category-wildlife-conservation","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2016"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6242,"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2016\/revisions\/6242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}