Discarded or drifting in the ocean, plastic debris can accumulate on the water’s surface, forming floating islands of garbage. Although it’s harder to spot, researchers suspect a significant amount ...

San Francisco Bay, like Monterey Bay to its south, is a rare success story in ocean conservation. In the 1960s, three grassroots activists—Sylvia McLaughlin, Kay Kerr, and Esther Gulick ...

However, plastic waste also collects much deeper. Even material that weighs less than water can sink as algae and other organisms glom onto it, and through other processes. Bits of this light plastic, ...