The Midway Atoll is a depository for tons of ocean plastic each year. This is bad news for the Laysan albatross which nests here.
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Midway Atoll (CNN)| Shock, combined with a little wonder at the unnatural. That’s how I feel as I watch the knife slice through the sternum of a dead Laysan albatross.
Inside its ribcage: a sickening array of plastic.
A red bottle top from a well-known soft drink brand. A cigarette lighter. Or two. Long thin items I couldn’t begin to identify.
It looked like the bird had swallowed the contents of an entire trash can whole.Yet this wasn’t because it dined on a refuse site. I was on Midway Island, in the remote Pacific Ocean, at least 1,500 miles from the nearest one of those. This disgusting and otherworldly sight exists because we’re throwing the equivalent of one garbage truck of plastic into the oceans every minute. By 2050, a number of researchers expect the world’s oceans to contain more plastic than fish, by weight.
Read Full Source (with video): These birds are choking on a plastic ocean – CNN.com
