It’s defined by ocean currents of the North Atlantic Gyre, which flood the Sargasso with multitudes of floating organisms. Unlike all other seas, the Sargasso has no land boundaries. There are five main oceanic gyres, and the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre is where the best-known garbage patch lies. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the Sargasso Sea are both oceanic gyres - marine zones where multiple ocean currents converge to form a vortex (though the Sargasso Sea is known for its floating algae rather than drifting garbage). With neustons so plentiful in the Sargasso, the scientists wondered if there might also be a neuston presence in an ocean region shaped by similar surface current activity: the garbage patch, said marine biologist Rebecca Helm, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor of environmental science at Georgetown University’s Earth Commons Institute in Washington, DC.Ī seaweed blob twice the width of the US is heading toward Florida.
The Sargasso was previously the only ocean spot known to host neustons in such high densities, researchers reported Thursday in the journal PLOS Biology. They’re part of a community of creatures thriving in the 620,000 square miles (1.6 million square kilometers) of plastic debris - an area roughly the size of Alaska - that’s hosting a floating ecosystem.Īt the heart of the garbage patch, the abundance of these drifters was comparable to that of neustons in the Sargasso Sea, a region of the Atlantic Ocean named for the quantities of Sargassum seaweed on its surface. In particular, there are violet sea snails in the Janthina genus and bright-blue jellyfish relatives known as sea rafts (Velella genus) and blue sea buttons (Porpita genus). A surprising number of delicate, floating invertebrates, called neustons, are making the Great Pacific Garbage Patch home, according to data from a new study.
Ocean surface currents have shaped the enormous garbage pile for decades, funneling human-made debris into a region that extends for hundreds of thousands of square miles in the North Pacific, spanning waters between Hawaii and California.īut that’s not all the currents are transporting. Translucent, fragile marine creatures that drift through the sea are riding the motion of the ocean to a destination that’s infamous as a home for trash: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
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