The accumulation of plastics in subtropical gyres 

Plastic pollution is the dominant type of ubiquitous anthropogenic debris in the marine environment (Barnes et al., 2009; Derraik, 2002; Gregory and Ryan, 1997)
Floating plastic fragments have been reported in northern hemisphere subtropical gyres since the early 1970s in the North Atlantic (Carpenter and Smith, 1972; Colton et al., 1974; Law et al., 2010), and in the North Pacific (Day et al., 1990; Moore et al., 2001; Hidalgo-Ruz et al., 2012).
There are few data describing plastic pollution in southern hemisphere subtropical gyres (Morris, 1980; Thiel et al., 2003), although 81% of the land surface south of the equator is water. of sea.
Plastic pollution, from both marine and terrestrial sources, migrates into subtropical gyres (Maximenko et al., 2012; Lebreton et al., 2012) where it forms zones of microplastic particle accumulation distinct from the surrounding relatively pollution-free waters plastic.

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