
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 twine off Iceland in 1957.
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.














