Scientists have found a giant floating rubbish tip in the North Atlantic Ocean made up of thousands of pieces of plastic. The large dump is north of the Caribbean and made up of tens of thousands of tiny pieces of plastic. It is said to be a similar size to the 'great Pacific garbage patch' between Hawaii and California. Karen Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association said discarded plastic, which is known to harm seabirds, had been 'largely ignored' in the Atlantic. The revelation comes after a 22-year study at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, US. During the study, the longest and most extensive record of plastic marine debris in any ocean basin, SEA undergraduates collected more than 64,000 tiny bits of plastic. Scientists and students carried out 61,000 sweeps of the ocean near Bermuda by towing fine mesh nets behind a research vessel. More than half of these expeditions revealed floating pieces of plastic on the water surface. These were pieces of low-density plastic that are used to make many consumer products including plastic bags. Dr Lavender Law said that the pieces of plastic were generally very small - up to 1cm. 'We found a region fairly far north in the Atlantic Ocean where this debris appears to be concentrated and remains over long periods of time,' she said. 'More than 80per cent of the plastic pieces we collected in the tows were found between 22 and 38 degrees north. So we have a latitude for [where this] rubbish seems to accumulate,' she said. The maximum 'plastic density' was 200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometre. 'That's a maximum that is comparable with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,' said Dr Lavender Law. But she added that there was not yet a clear estimate of the size of the patches in either the Pacific or the Atlantic. 'I think the word "patch" can be misleading,' she added. 'This is widely dispersed and it's small pieces of plastic,' she said. The impacts on the marine environment of the plastics were still unknown, she said. 'But we know that many marine organisms are consuming these plastics and we know this has a bad effect on seabirds in particular.'



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