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Presentation Mar 3. Please share widely. Contact: Katharine Appleyard FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
253 879 3716 <mailto:kappleyard1@gmail.com> kappleyard1@gmail.com AN EVENING WITH CAPTAIN CHARLES MOORE; “A MONTH IN THE GREAT PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH” Tacoma, WA – February 23, 2015: Captain Charles Moore, author of “Plastic Ocean,” and Founder of Algalita Marine Research Foundation will be speaking in the Rotunda at the University of Puget Sound on March 3rd, at 5:30pm. Capt. Moore was among the first to bring the concerns about marine plastic debris to a wider audience and his most recent research had him spending a month in the North Pacific Gyre, the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” This presentation is free and is hosted by the Sierra Club, University of Puget Sound, the Surfrider Foundation, Sound Policy Institute, and Tahoma Audubon. “The 2014 voyage was my tenth and longest research voyage aboard the Oceanographic Research Vessel Alguita,” says Captain Moore. “We discovered an island of plastic that I was able to actually walk on. Some of the original research that we did involved the taking of blood from various fish species to help determine the effects of living in a platicized habitat.” This plastic sea, along with the ocean’s increasingly toxic state, is the new reality of the gyres, the large, slowly turning currents that circle the planet. Captain Moore’s presentation will detail other experiments done on the voyage, plastic and plankton sampling and the use of drones use in documenting the extent of the open-ocean plastic problem. Charles Moore founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in 1994. In 1995 he launched his aluminum hulled research vessel, Alguita, in Hobart, Tasmania, and helped organize a research voyage to document anthropogenic contamination of Australia's east coast. It was on the return after a 1997 yacht race to Hawaii that Captain Moore veered from the usual sea route and saw an ocean he had not known before. "Every time I came on deck to survey the horizon, I saw a soap bottle, bottle cap or a shard of plastic waste bobbing by. Here I was in the middle of the ocean, and there was nowhere I could go to avoid the plastic." For the past 20 years, Captain Moore has raised awareness about the issue and continues to actively work toward a future without marine plastic. Along with authoring two scientific papers and the book “Plastic Ocean,” Captain Moore and the Algalita Foundation conducts research and facilitates a variety of collaborative scientific voyages. For more information on this event, please contact Katherine Appleyard (above). # # #