Figure 1.

Study sites located in the eastern North Pacific Ocean. Concurrent surface and underwater trawling (down to 2000 m water depths) was performed at five stations along a cruise transect from Honolulu (Hawaii, USA) to Rosarito (Mexico) to study the vertical distribution of plastic debris (500 µm to 5 cm in size). The predicted boundaries of the North Pacific Garbage Patch (defined as microplastic concentrations >1 kg/km²) are shown as dashed lines and taken from¹³.