A black swan pecks at a ball hit by Branden Grace of South Africa onto the green at the World Golf Championships-HSBC Champions golf tournament in Shanghai on Oct. 28, 2016.

(JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/Getty Images)

At a Glance

Wayward golf balls are adding microplastics to our oceans, which then get into the food chain.High schooler Alex Weber has recovered thousands of golf balls during dives near Pebble Beach Golf Links.She's working with an ecologist to study the effects of golf balls on the environment in hopes of learning more.

Unlike most golfers, Alex Weber doesn't mind spending most of her day in the water.

In 2016, the high school senior began diving for wayward golf balls off the coast of California's Pebble Beach Golf Links in Carmel Bay and quickly realized the number of balls lost to the oceans of the world each year are staggering. Despite their durability, golf balls can be broken down by the oceans, releasing hundreds of pieces of microplastics that are then , Hakai Magazine said.

Weber has swiped more than 20,000 golf balls from the sea floor, but that's just one golf course. Hakai Magazine estimates there are some 32,000 oceansidegolf courses across the world.

A 2017 Chemical and Engineering News report estimated 1.2 billion golf balls , and only a fraction of those become only a fraction of all the plastic pollution that reaches our oceans. But Weber wants to lessenmicroplastics created by these golf balls, and she has teamed up withecologist Matthew Savoca to further study the impact they're having on the environment.

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Alex Weber and Jack Johnston retrieve dozens of golf balls from the seafloor.

(Screenshot via YouTube video)

"Big waves come through and uncover them," she told Hakai Magazine. "It can sometimes make what we’re doing feel futile."

But Weber knows that every second wasted means another ball is being broken open by the elements, freeing the rubber inside to break down into pieces small enough that they can be consumed by tiny organisms. Once they get into the food chain, they can be transferred all the way up to humans, University of Toronto scientist Chelsea Rochman told Hakai Magazine.

"We find microplastic virtually everywhere we sample," she said. "It affects wildlife, and it's in our seafood."

Weber and fellow classmate Jack Johnston have found remnants of golf balls – a testament to how resilient the balls are – during their dives, they told Golf.com. Balls have also been found in the stomachs of beached whales and dead birds, and although they know it's a long road ahead, Weber hopes her dives will eventually serve as the catalyst for policy change that protects sea creatures from plastics turned loose by the decomposingballs.

"I've devoted my life to this issue, and golf balls in the ocean had never come up," Anna Cummins, co-founder of the nonprofit 5 Gyres Institute, which works to reduce plastic pollution in the oceans, told Golf.com. "Sometimes it takes the innocence and fresh perspective of youth to see an old problem in a new way. I love that Jack and Alex are introducing this issue to an entirely new audience."