In a lot of ways, the weather of the four giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) should be easier to understand than that of the earth, because there are no oceans and continents to complicate matters.
"I was astounded to hear that that there are places in our oceans where the ratio between plastic and plankton is 6-to-1, " de Rothschild told CNN, referring to the area.
There are some 25, 000 ships plying the world's oceans at any given time.
These oceans, and the fish that live there, are full of plastic, reduced to confetti, incessant from shore to shore, spread out like a spoonful of sand across a football field, over two-thirds of the Earth's surface.
There are dozens of species of large squid in the world's oceans, but the giant squid is by far the largest.
Right now there are only 1, 500 data-sensing buoys floating on all the oceans.
There are in fact five known "garbage patches" in the world's oceans.
For a variety of reasons, including formerly unrestrained whale hunting, now there are three separate, reproductively isolated groups in the Pacific, Atlantic and Southern oceans.
For starters, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) says the global fishing fleet is 2.5 times bigger than "what the oceans can sustainably support" - i.e. there are too many boats catching too many fish, and not giving fish stocks enough time to replenish them.
But whereas he was concerned about the future of the oceans that are so important to his country, he also said there were reasons to be optimistic about the future.
Forty million years ago, when the earth was warmer because there was more carbon dioxide in the air as a result of volcanic eruptions, the oceans are thought to have been 70 meters (or 229 feet) higher.
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