The Dr Fridtjof Nansen is plying the waves of the southern Indian Ocean, trawling for trash.
Every time the ship's scientific crew threw down special nets, they hauled in pieces of plastics, underscoring the risk of dramatic upheavals in marine ecosystems even in one of the world's least-known and least-visited environments.
An estimated 5 trillion pieces of plastic currently float in the world's oceans, up from none in 1950 and posing a question about their potential impact on a food supply chain that stretches from plankton - which have been filmed eating plastic pellets - up through shellfish, salmon, tuna and eventually humans, not to mention whales.