Plastic, plastic, plastic everywhere... The world's oceans are full of discarded trash that degrades and sinks.There are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the ocean. Of that mass, 269000 tons float on the surface, while some four billion plastic microfibers per square kilometer litter the deep sea.
Scientists call this "wow factor" of ocean trash. The tallies published last year in three separate scientific papers which are useful in red-flagging the scope of the problem for the public. But these how does adding up those rice-size fragments of plastic help solve the problem?
Although scientists have known for decades about the accumulating mass of ocean debris and its deadly consequences for seabirds, fish, and marine animals, the science of sea trash is young and full of as-yet unsolved mysteries. Almost nothing was known about the amount of plastic in remote regions of the Southern Hemisphere, for example, until last year because few had ever traveled there to collect samples.