The ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ has been billed as a floating island of plastic debris, stretching out across an area of ocean the size of India, a testament to man’s abuse of the planet.

So when images emerged from the first aerial survey of the area they proved somewhat underwhelming.

Far from showing a vast swathe of plastic containers, fishing nets and rubbish, the detritus was seen to be scattered over a wide area, with just 1,000 large objects discovered in a survey of thousands of square miles.

Although The Ocean Cleanup, the charity who carried out the sweep, claimed that they had found more plastic than was expected, other experts said the ‘garbage patch’ was a myth which had never been substantiated by any proper scientific research and risked diverting attention from the real problem – a dangerous build of microplastics in the area.