Space Daily September 08, 2026 • 06:00

A silk mesh recorder towed at 7 meters behind ferries and container ships logged 16,725 tows across the North Atlantic between 1957 and 2016, and the fault reports nobody filed as pollution data held 208 plastic entanglements, the first one a length of trawl t - Space Daily

A silk mesh recorder towed at 7 meters behind ferries and container ships logged 16,725 tows across the North Atlantic between 1957 and 2016, and the fault reports nobody filed as pollution data held 208 plastic entanglements, the first one a length of trawl t - Space Daily

An accidental archive of ocean plastic emerged from six decades of maintenance logs kept by technicians who were simply noting when a plankton-sampling device malfunctioned.

Since 1957, a device called the Continuous Plankton Recorder has been towed behind ordinary merchant ships and ferries crossing the North Atlantic, quietly filtering seawater through a band of silk m… [+6018 chars]

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