Great Pacific garbage patch crops up in the Pacific – and it could be FOUR times the size of the UK
Grim discovery comes after that seafood lovers were warned they eat 11,000 pieces of plastic every year thanks to pollution
SCIENTISTS first discovered a soup-like rubbish patch of plastic floating between Hawaii and California in the 1980s.
But decades on and it appears that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch might not be unique.
Scientists have spotted yet another collection of marine debris - and they reckon it's four times the size of Britain or the same size as Mexico.
Nestled between Chile and Easter Island in the South Pacific, the new patch is a collection of small plastic fragments that are tricky to spot with the naked eye.
It comes as seafood lovers were warned that they eat 11,000 pieces of toxic plastic every year.
The South Pacific patch was uncovered by a team of researchers and volunteers led by Captain Charles Moore during a six-month voyage aboard the ORV Alguita ship.
"We discovered tremendous quantities of plastic," Moore told .
"My initial impression is that our samples compared to what we were seeing in the North Pacific in 2007, so it’s about ten years behind," said Moore.
Moore, who has spent years raising awareness of plastic pollution since he saw the North Pacific patch while captaining a racing yacht in the 1990s, believes the patch could be up to one million square kilometres.
Patches like this form around rotating ocean currents which are called gyres.
Five gyres are known to exist in our oceans, of which the North Pacific Gyre - where a garbage patch was first spotted - is the largest.
Moore's expedition is the second team to collect samples of plastic pollution in the South Pacific Gyre.
The ORV Alguita criss-crossed between Chile and Easter Island to collect samples of the new garbage patch.
The first team to notice the "patch" was led by Dr Markus Eriksen in 2011, who said he saw "very little debris" at that time.
Moore said it is likely that huge amounts of rubbish have entered the sea since, and that this particular patch is distributed unevenly - so trawlers may sail through empty spots.
MOST READ IN TECH AND SCIENCE
"We found a few larger items, occasionally a buoy and some fishing gear, but most of it was broken into bits," Moore added.
Moore and his team are currently cleaning the samples they've collected and will analyse them before publishing the results.
We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at tips@the-sun.co.uk or call 0207 782 4368
