Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast with me, Alex Collins.

Today I'm taking you back to 1971 when a marine biologist made a shocking discovery,

finding small bits of floating plastic in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Today vast amounts of plastics can be found in our oceans, but back in the 1970s, very

few people even thought about it. Plastics are in the sea ice, in the Arctic,

at the top of Mount Everest, in the Himalayas, they are in table salt, it's in our drinking water,

it's in our bloodstream, it's in human excrement. That said would carpenter. Back in September 1971,

he was thousands of miles out in the Atlantic Ocean. He was taking part in a research cruise.

As he brought his net in for the first time, he noticed something very odd.

I knew immediately that this was a really big thing and I said to my colleague,

look at this, you know, every single toe that we take, we get this plastic and they were mostly

white plastic, white particles as I remember. Some of them were jagged, like they had just broken

up from something bigger, they didn't belong here, then they had also other marine organisms

growing on them. Every time he brought his net in, more and more plastic was found.

The fact that all this plastic was identifiable showed how resilient it was.

Edward worried if it was this far out in the ocean, was it everywhere in the sea?

He was convinced that plastic would damage marine life and he wanted to look into it more,

but there was just one small problem. The senior scientist thought that I should really stick to

biology. In other words, do you do your science with blinders on and don't look left to right?

His boss eventually asked him to stop, but Edward would not be deterred, so he carried out the work

in secret. His excitement gave him the inspiration to write a paper in 1972 about his surprise discovery,

but his peers and the wider scientific community didn't want to listen. It got so bad for Edward,

...