Giant garbage vortexes aren’t just for the Pacific anymore, scientists reported there’s one in the Atlantic Ocean too. East side!

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

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.

The rest of the fragments come from illegally dumped raw Jersey Shore footage.

Huge Garbage Patch Found in Atlantic Too [National Geographic]

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