The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an area of contaminated ocean split between two regions, one off the coast of California and another near Japan. The Patch is not a mountain of tin cans and old tires sitting on the ocean’s surface, but more like a thick soup of millions of plastic particles, trapped in the sway of large ocean currents called gyres. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Researchers exploring these manmade marine mishaps have found that many marine species—even those that normally live far away in coastal waters—have begun to call the Patch home.

For many years, researchers assumed that coastal-living marine animals wouldn’t last long in the open ocean, removed from their normal biome and food chain. One

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