60-year plankton recorder logs reveal sharp rise in North Atlantic plastic entanglement

September 8, 2026 at 11:00 AM2 min

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A 60-year record from Continuous Plankton Recorder maintenance logs shows macroplastic entanglement rose sharply from 2000, with 208 confirmed cases across 16,725 tows. The study, published in Nature Communications, found the rate roughly an order of magnitude higher than earlier decades. Fishing gear dominates recent entanglements, while plastic bag incidents declined since 2000.

Key Facts

Between 1957 and 2016, the Continuous Plankton Recorder completed 16,725 tows across the North Atlantic and adjacent seas, covering more than 6.5 million nautical miles.
Researchers confirmed 208 genuine cases of macroplastic entanglement, defined as debris larger than five millimetres.
The earliest confirmed entanglement occurred in 1957 off the east coast of Iceland, caused by trawl twine.
From 2000 onward, the entanglement rate climbed to roughly an order of magnitude higher than the earlier baseline.
Plastic bag entanglements declined in the record since 2000, even as overall macroplastic counts kept climbing.

The Accidental Dataset

Since 1957, the Continuous Plankton Recorder has been towed behind ordinary merchant ships and ferries crossing the North Atlantic, filtering seawater through a silk mesh at about seven metres depth. Its purpose was to catch plankton, not litter, but every time the mesh jammed or the mechanism fouled, technicians on land wrote a note about what had gone wrong. Those maintenance notes, filed for six decades by technicians with no interest in pollution monitoring, became one of the longest continuous records of ocean plastic in the world. A team led by Clare Ostle at the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth, working with the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science, extracted every mention of entanglement with man-made debris from the fault logs.

Entanglement Trends

The earliest confirmed case sits at the start of the record: in 1957, off the east coast of Iceland, a technician noted the Recorder fouled by trawl twine. The second dates to 1965, off the northwest coast of Ireland, where a plastic bag caught in the tow. For the next two decades, entries of this kind stayed rare, but the study found a statistically significant rise in entanglements between the 1950s-60s and the 1970s-80s, and again between those decades and the 1990s and 2000s. From 2000 the rate climbed sharply, described in the paper as roughly an order of magnitude higher than the earlier baseline. Early entries were dominated by fishing gear, twine and net fragments, while later records are increasingly dominated by fishing gear, nets, line and rope, concentrated in the North Sea.