Six decades of ship logs reveal a hidden timeline of ocean plastic

Researchers mined six decades of fault logs from the Continuous Plankton Recorder tows and found 208 confirmed macroplastic entanglements among 16,725 tows (1957–2016) across the North Atlantic. The first entry in 1957 noted trawl twine off Iceland, with a 1965 bag entanglement; from the 1990s onward the rate climbs, dominated by fishing gear, nets, and rope, while plastic bags decline after 2000. The dataset is not pollution-designed but provides a long, fixed-depth record aligned with other evidence of rising ocean plastic, illustrating how existing monitoring programs can reveal pollution trends even when not intended for that purpose. The CPR continues to operate, but the record has clear limits (no volume, no deep-water data).