Plastic, Ahoy!: Investigating the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by Patricia Newman (review)

In 2009 three graduate students boarded the New Horizon with the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition to study the now infamous garbage-riddled gyre in the Pacific Ocean. Each student had a particular mission. Miriam wanted to know whether the marine insect Halobates, which thrives while drifting around on plastic bits, deprives other organisms of food. Darcy focused on the relative populations of phytoplankton near the shore and in the gyre. Chelsea, a chemist, gathered information on leeching and absorption of chemicals as the plastic breaks down at sea. The spotlight on how these three scientists-in-training go about constructing their experiments and gathering data is similar to that of the Scientists in the Field series, only pitched here for a slightly younger audience. This title lacks the allure of the rubber ducky and sneaker flotsam (not to mention the effervescent personality of its oceanographer subject) in Loree Griffin Burns’ Tracking Trash (BCCB 5/07), but Newman does a solid job of walking readers through the trio of studies in an orderly fashion, and plenty of color photographs convey a sense of ship life for readers more drawn to the adventure than the science. Too much truly useful information is tucked into sidebars and lengthy picture captions, though, forcing readers into a dilemma of whether to lose the narrative flow to catch the background, or stick with the story and backtrack later for the missing pieces. Source notes and an index are included, as well as a handful of books and a brief but well selected list of websites for further research.