Knowing the “Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch” exists is one thing … seeing it up close is an entirely different — and, even to scientists, shocking — matter.

Researchers with the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition (SEAPLEX) returned this week after a three-week journey to the North Pacific Ocean Gyre, a little-explored region of the sea that’s accumulated a giant and growing swirl of plastic trash.

Travelling on the research vessel New Horizon, the scientists had set out to survey how much plastic is actually floating in the ocean, how widely it’s distributed and how it impacts marine life. Little previous research had been done in any of those areas.

The expedition was led by a team of Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) graduate students, with support from University of California Ship Funds, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Project Kaisei.

Six days after departing their home port of San Diego, researchers aboard the vessel encountered the first plastic-sampling site on 9 August. Flecks of plastic were abundant in the gyre, and easy to spot against the deep blue background of the sea. The team then began 24-hour sampling using a variety of tow nets to collect trash from different ocean depths.

“We targeted the highest plastic-containing areas so we could begin to understand the scope of the problem,” said Miriam Goldstein of SIO, chief scientist of the expedition. “We also studied everything from phytoplankton to zooplankton to small midwater fish.”

The researchers retrieved a variety of items from the “garbage patch,” including a large net entwined with plastic and many plastic bottles that had become home to an assortment of marine creatures.

“Finding so much plastic there was shocking,” said Goldstein. “How could there be this much plastic floating in a random patch of ocean–a thousand miles from land?”

The team also collected several different types of species swimming in the gyre:  by-the-wind sailors (a type of jellyfish), pearleye fish and lanternfish.

Upon the expedition’s return, Linda Goad, program director in NSF’s Division of Ocean Sciences, said, “We hope that SEAPLEX will result in increased awareness of a growing issue.”

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