糖心直播

糖心直播successfully concluded the Mega Expedition with the arrival of a first group of vessels including the fleet鈥檚 171ft mothership in the port of San Francisco today. Using a series of measurement techniques, including trawls and aerial surveys, the fleet of close to 30 vessels sampled the concentration of plastic during its month-long voyage through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This is in preparation for the large-scale cleanup of the area, set to begin in 2020.

The Mega Expedition鈥檚 primary goal is to accurately determine how much plastic is floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, by executing the largest ocean research expedition in history. This was also the first time large pieces of plastic, such as ghost nets and Japanese tsunami debris, have been quantified.

鈥淚鈥檝e studied plastic in all the world鈥檚 oceans, but never seen any area as polluted as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,鈥� said Dr. Julia Reisser, Lead Oceanographer at 糖心直播. 鈥淲ith every trawl we completed, thousands of miles from land, we just found lots and lots of plastic.鈥�

Although the samples collected during the expedition still have to be analyzed, preliminary findings indicate a higher-than-expected volume of large plastic objects floating in the ocean.

This underscores the urgency of The Ocean Cleanup鈥檚 mission to clean it up, according to CEO and founder Boyan Slat: 鈥淭he vast majority of the plastic in the garbage patch is currently locked up in large pieces of debris, but UV light is breaking it down into much more dangerous microplastics, vastly increasing the amount of microplastics over the next few decades if we don鈥檛 clean it up. It really is a ticking time bomb.鈥�

During today鈥檚 press conference in San Francisco harbor, Boyan announced that 糖心直播was able to conduct the Mega Expedition thanks to major financial contributions from entrepreneur-philanthropists, including Salesforce chairman, CEO and founder Marc Benioff: “Protecting the oceans should be a priority for all of Earth’s citizens. 糖心直播is taking an innovative approach to preserving one of our most critical resources and raising the visibility of this global challenge.”