Huge garbage patch found in Atlantic too

From an article by Richard A. Lovett for National Geographic News:

Billions of bits of plastic are accumulating in a massive garbage patch in the Atlantic Ocean—a lesser known cousin to the Texas-size trash vortex in the Pacific, scientists say.

"Many people have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch," said Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

"But this issue has essentially been ignored in the Atlantic."

The newly described garbage patch sits hundreds of miles off the North American coast. Although its east-west span is unknown, the patch covers a region between 22 and 38 degrees north latitude—roughly the distance from Cuba to Virginia.

As with the Pacific garbage patch, plastic can circulate in this part of the Atlantic Ocean for years, posing health risks to fish, seabirds, and other marine animals that accidentally eat the litter.

Elusive Ocean Trash
To get a clear picture of the Atlantic garbage patch, Law drew on 22 years of data collected by students participating in her association's SEA Semester academic program.

As part of this program, more than 7,000 students have gone on research cruises, deploying thousands of fine-meshed plankton nets to meticulously catalog bits of plastic enmeshed with the drifting plants and animals.

Tiny pieces of trash, each less than a tenth the weight of a paper clip, make up most of the debris, Law said February 23 at the American Geophysical Union's 2010 Ocean Sciences meeting in Portland, Oregon.

In some places the students found more than 200,000 bits of trash per square kilometer (520,000 bits per square mile). The vast majority of these fragments come from consumer products that were blown out of open landfills or were tossed out by litterbugs.