Estudio de los flujos de dispersión de los residuos plásticos en el Golfo de Cádiz debido a las corrientes superficiales marinas: una propuesta didáctica para iniciar a los alumnos de 1º ESO en la indagación científica escolar.

The contamination of the marine environment by plastics is an emerging environmental threat that began to be notified in the seventies of the last century, and that currently affects the majority of marine organisms. In the educational field, the study of marine currents and their capacity to transport plastic debris to areas far from where they were produced is rarely addressed in a practical way, so that the perception that students have of this problem is very low. In this article we describe a teaching-learning experience by research that, with 12-year-old students, allowed us to discover some of the possible trajectories of plastic debris in the Gulf of Cadiz. For this purpose, a total of 21 bottles with messages were launched from Santa María del Mar beach (Cadiz) and on three different dates. Thanks to the citizen collaboration, the possible trajectories of 5 of these bottles could be reconstructed. Two of them were transported by currents to the northwest and reached the beaches of Portugal. Two others were taken to the Southeast and beached on the beaches of Conil and Tarifa respectively. Finally, the fifth was found on the same launch beach. The final evaluation of the experience suggests that the students expanded and modified their knowledge about marine currents and the environmental problem of plastic debris in the marine environment and were able to generate scientific-school data on the subject researched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]