In June of 2018, long-distance swimmer Ben Lecomte attempted to become the first human
EVER to swim across the Pacific Ocean. The record-setting fifty-five hundred mile trans-Pacific
crossing not only pushed Lecomte to his very limits. It also forced the crew onboard the
support boat Seeker to battle the elements. And overcome one challenge. Ben, there's a
shark. Just right there. !@#$ me. After another. I want the motion to just stop. After another. We
lost the ability to start the generator. We can run our engine, but I don’t know how
long it’s going to last.
It’s a piece of duct tape on -- a bigger problem. Although a devastating break finally
forced Ben and his team to end their attempted crossing, thousands of miles short of their
final destination. The Swim has raised awareness for the plastic pollution problem in our
oceans. The expedition also resulted in the collection of invaluable scientific data that
could help find a solution. The opportunity swim gave us, at least for the scientific
community, was fantastic. We never had the opportunity to sample at such a high resolution.
It has never been done to collect data from one end of the ocean to the other. Ben was
swimming relatively at a slow pace. I mean, very fast compared to mine. But in terms of
quality of data. It means that we had samples collected very close to each other. Dr. Sarah-Jeanne
Royer is a researcher who has been studying ocean ecology for more than a decade. My
general research is all about plastic pollution and plastic in the environment. This, of
course, is a relatively new field of study. Plastic wasn’t mass produced and widely consumed
until the 1950s. But today, we find plastic everywhere. And I mean EVERYWHERE. Even
turning up in places we really don’t want it to. We find an incredible high amount
of plastic discarded into the environment and the ocean on an everyday basis. In 2010,
about 8 million metric tons of plastic got discarded in the ocean. It's equivalent to
one garbage truck of plastic waste that gets discarded every minute in the ocean. Lecomte
and his crew encountered an astounding amount of plastic waste. Every five minutes, finding
a piece of plastic debris. This isn’t surprising, since one important planned stop on The Swim
was the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch which -- it turns out -- has a more scientifically
accurate name. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is actually the North Pacific Garbage
Patch. These are the same one, but I tend to use the geographical location of the patch.
It's just to make sure that we know geographically where it is located, rather than just using
a term that is maybe less scientific. But the confusion about the Garbage Patch involves
more than just its name. It's not a patch or a solid island per se. It's more like a
soup, and the soup may -- become more concentrated in plastic, may -- become greater and or smaller.
It's always in movement. I mean, there are several measurements and estimate of how much
the North Pacific Garbage Patch contains plastic. It changes and it varies. But the more measurements
we have, the better we can have an estimate of how much plastic is out there. The ocean
is in peril right now. And if we don’t do something that is going to reverse that in
the next few years, then it’s going to be much more difficult. Incredibly, we don’t
even know the answer to the very basic question -- exactly how much plastic is in our waters? We
have very little numbers about how much plastic is floating in the ocean. A study from four
years ago -- estimated that we only know about 1% of the fate of the plastic discarded in
the environment. There's 99% of this plastic that is currently missing. That’s right,
some experts estimate that we have only accounted for as little as ONE PERCENT of the plastic
in our oceans! So the opportunity to work with Ben Lecomte to establish scientific protocols
for The Swim was something Dr. Royer simply couldn’t pass up. I was like, "Oh, this
is wonderful. We can do visual survey and look at the plastic with binoculars." We
can also collect with the Manta Trawl and we can make microfiber measurements with sea
water. This just one sample from many, many, many that we will take on this trip. We were
so happy with all these sampes. And these are very precious for us. The crew also attached
GPS buoys to debris to help track their movement. All this science--while simultaneously supporting
the long-distance swimmer during his grueling trans-Pacific swim. Just keep swimming. Just
keep swimming. He’s gonna keep going until his body breaks, the boat breaks, or the weather
stops him. It has taken countless hours to sort through all the micro-plastic samples
collected in the deployment of more than 40 Manta Trawls during The Swim. For one Manta
Trawl, which is one sample, you might have, like, up to 3,000 pieces of plastic. First
you need to count them. Then you need to measure them to see how big they are and to do the
size fractionation. Then we are looking at the color. And then we have also an index
that tells us more about the degradation level and also the biomass. So how much biology
is growing on these pieces. This painstaking work -- combined with the visual surveys and
GPS tracking -- allow researchers like Dr. Royer to work towards better understanding
our plastic pollution problem. The science behind The Swim has also led to a sobering
realization about how big the problem actually is. Key points here is that all of the samples
that were collected had plastic. And the one that had the highest amount were higher than
3,000 pieces of polymers we did in one tow. Having seen these polymers every single day, and
in average every six minutes during their cruises, shows the extent of the problem. And
it’s SINGLE-USE PLASTICS that’s proving to be a BIG problem. They are cheap plastic.
They are made to not last too long. This is dangerous and toxic for the environment, because
it's a weak polymer, it fragments quickly. And then, it becomes smaller and smaller with
size, it leaks all of these additives. And then, it becomes very available to more organisms
in the food web. The single-use plastic, they are really bad for the environment. As disheartening
as this all may seem, the good news is that all the high-resolution data gathered during
Lecomte’s one-hundred-sixty-five day swim are helping scientists work toward a solution. We
are still working with the samples that were collected during the swim. There are thousands
and thousands and thousands of pieces. And we are trying to understand better the polymer
types, the chemical signature, how degraded they are. We are working with instruments
and different types of techniques to get a better understanding. And I hope then soon
we'll have a publication out and be able to share with the scientific community. Some
data from The Swim has already been put to good use. There's one of the publications
that was actually conducted by Matthias Egger at The Ocean Cleanup, where he looked at the
different size fractionation of different types of marine debris in the North Pacific
Garbage Patch. But answering the fundamental questions — like how the Great Pacific Garbage
Patch influences the movement of plastic waste throughout the world ocean. Or exactly how
much plastic is in our waters. At this moment, in 2021, we have a lot more research that
is trying to answer the question, where is the missing plastic? Fortunately, there’s
still a lot of promising work to come out of this expedition— which was a huge success.
At least on the science side of things. I felt really sorry for Ben that he could not
finish the swim. But I found that Ben said, "Okay, I'm going to make something out of
this." And he continued then from Hawaii to San Francisco, and he decided to really dig
into the issue of plastic pollution and to continue measuring plastic and to bring more
awareness. Which only means more future collaborations between the swimmer and the scientist. So
Ben did call me a couple of weeks ago and he's like, "Sarah, do you want to come with
us to Cocos Island, close to Costa Rica so we could put together a scientific protocol,
and look at the concentrations of plastic." And this is so exciting. I could not say no to
him. For more on Ben Lecomte’s trans-Pacific swim, check out the full-length documentary
-- The Swim -- now streaming on Discovery-plus. And while you get set to consume all that great
content, we strongly urge you to stop consuming single use plastics.