POP Hopping the Bermuda Triangle

Surface sampling in a desert lake

You might say Plastic Ocean Project has been getting around! Two weeks ago we surfaced sampled Pyramid Lake in Reno, NV, had a beach cleanup at Santa Monica Beach, CA organized by high school student Leyla Namazie, combining forces with St. Mary's College and Heal the Bay, collected trash while visiting with Ocean Defenders Alliance, Huntington Beach, CA, and currently joined Beautiful Nation Project in Bermuda to show students from schools around the world how we study plastics in the ocean.  Phew, its been busy.  

Mark Gandolfo UNR exams sample

Cleaning up the environment needs a lot of players.  From educators like Tonia Lovejoy and Shanon Hagon, Beautiful Nation Project, teaching children around the globe about ocean issues through STEM to caring people like Kurt Lieber, founder of Ocean Defenders Alliance.  His crew works on cleaning up the bottom of the ocean from dangerous lost fishing gear that capture unsuspecting prey that feeds on animals trapped in the net and then often times get entangled as well.  More and more people are stepping up to organize cleanup events and getting involved in studying all bodies of water for plastics including lakes. Thanks to Mark Gandolfo and Nancy Vucinich, who helped us work with the Paiute Indian Reservation that allowed us to sample Pyramid Lake just outside of Reno, NV.

Thanks to the funding from Project Aware who funded our plastic trash art exhibit, we successfully delivered "What goes around, comes around" to southern California where it will go up on display at the Aquarium of the Pacific come December 1st.  Another success, thanks to the generous contributions from people like you, singer-songwriter Jack Johnson matched donations of $2500 so we can continue the work with so many people across the country and across the pond to Bermuda.  We will be going out to sea with Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences working around the hurricane that is headed this way.  Stay tuned!

We will begin our surface sampling tomorrow so stay tuned to see what the Tropical Storm Fay might have dragged in.