amongst the general public. Since 2013, the Martinique-based organisation has been running expeditions that enable scientists to analyse ocean pollution by plastics on the spot.

Understand and inform before repairing

Patrick Deixonne and his crew have sailed to the North Atlantic, the Pacific and, in 2016, the Bay of Biscay, with the scientific support, at sea and on land, of institutions such as the French National Scientific Research Centre (CNRS) and the European Space Agency.

The seafarer claims that We need to understand, before repairing. We need fundamental scientific research. What is the proportion of nanometric waste? How are the plastics distributed in the water column? How do the pollutants, bacteria and viruses move around? And what are their exact impacts on the

When you row across the Atlantic, you have time to admire the landscape, and also to observe some rather strange objects... When Patrick Deixonne, a member of the Société des explorateurs , set off on a new single-handed adventure in 2009, he came across gigantic masses of plastics drifting on the surface.

When did these vortexes, that exist in all the world s oceans, start to form? No one knows exactly. They cannot be seen from space and were described for the first time by the American oceanographer, Charles Moore, in 1997. They are made up of about 250,000 tonnes of plastic debris from coastal and inland cities, from which they are conveyed to the ocean by river.

It s not a continent in terms of density , explains Patrick Deixonne, because it is more like a floating mass of fragmented plastic. But in terms of surface area, the North Pacific garbage patch is as big as Europe.

When he returned to land, the seafarer founded Expédition 7e Continent , an organisation dedicated to the exploration of these zones that can only be seen from the deck of a ship, and to raising awareness

© 5 gy re s

Fragments de plastique sur une plage | Plastic debris on a beach