The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Published by You think your local landfill is too big, imagine a patch of garbage twice the size of Texas.
The Great Garbage Patch lies in the North Pacific Ocean, specifically in the center of a region known as the North Pacific Gyre. A Grye is a vortex formed by the current flow. There are five major ones in our worlds oceans. Things have a tendency to get sucked in and from there on, cannot get out without help.
The North Pacific gyre circles clock wise, running down the side of North America, the USA and Mexico in particular, swooping across just north of the equator, and up past China and Japan, to where it returns across the ocean to North America. You can imagine the vortex created as things get pulled into the center.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:North_Pacific_Subtropical_Convergence_Zone.jpg
The Great Garbage Patch is known by many names, the Eastern Garbage Patch, being one originally given to it, and The Pacific Trash Votex, being another. As it does not lie in any major shipping route and cannot be seen by satellite it was predicted to exist, long before it was actually discovered. In fact although it was predicted to exist in 1988, it wasn’t until Charles Moore actually sailed into it in 1997 that people really saw it.
The reasons it cannot be seen by satellite is that it is not a solid object, in consists of floating debris, some of which are tiny pieces the size of peas. Additionally much of the waste floats in suspension just under the surface, massive drift nets and so forth. Many items hang vertically in the garbage patch with only a tiny portion at the surface.
Billions, of tiny plastic pellets, known as nurdles, or mermaid tears, occupy The Great Garbage Patch, being mostly clear round pellets they are hard to see in the water, but are certainly out there, in fact they represent up to 98% of the beach debris in some areas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nurdles_01_gentlemanrook.jpg Nurdles
About 80% of the crap floating around out there comes from the land, leaving 20% as coming from ships. Indeed some items entered the vortex due to accidents, while other items were things disposed of at sea. Storms would have most certainly sucked some items out to sea. Shipwrecks would have some spilled cargo. Lost beach toys, patio chairs, and shoes, will never be recovered by their owners.
Why Should we Care?
Many sea animals are being killed as a result of this man made floating garbage pile. Many animals feed in this area and ingest poisons contained in the items within. Additionally by eating indigestible bits of plastic, which remain in the animals stomach, they slowly starve to death because they eventually can no longer consume and digest the food they need.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:North_Pacific_Subtropical_Convergence_Zone.jpg This Albatros Chick died because its parent fed it things from the Sea.
On a more human level jelly fish are eating toxic plastics. These are then eaten by fish, who enter the human food chain. Indeed we are then eating the toxins absorbed into their bodies, things like PCB’s and DDT.
What Can be Done?
Problems originate because no nation wants to take responsibility as many of the items floating in the Garbage Patch have no traceable origins. Nonetheless some groups are looking to take action. Project Kaisei being one of them. This is a California, and Hong Kong, based non-profit organization who want to look at cleaning up the problem and recycling some of the waste. On a 1000 mile trip from California to the edge of the Garbage patch in August 2009 they noted that the Garbage patch was at least 1700 miles wide. They noted that on the surface things mostly looked fine, but upon setting nets to retrieve suspended particles they found the most garbage was under water at shallow depths. Another trip is planned for the summer of 2010. I encourage you to visit their site and have included a link to it below, there is a place you can make donations.
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On December 13, 2009 at 2:12 pm
That certainly is an eye opener. I never knew about this problem. We’ll all have to solve the problems we incur in nature.
On December 13, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Wow Mark never knew anything about this, never even heard of it, good reporting.
On December 13, 2009 at 2:38 pm
It was my step daughter who brought it to my attention several months ago.
On December 13, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Sounds like a massive undertaking…but most environmental cleanups are.
On December 13, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Great article. I had never heard of this phenomena either, so thanks for getting this info out.
Plastic has revolutionized our lives, it is durable, lightweight, and malleable – but now we are polluting the planet with it. It never breaks down. I’ve read that biodegradable plastic garbage bags were made by mixing cornstarch in with the plastic. Of course the plastic never breaks down, and animals ate the plastic with the cornstarch, killing the animals.
It’s hard to imagine life without it though.
On December 15, 2009 at 9:07 pm
This planet is really coming to that level of toxicity out of our own making and there’s something about nature we couldn’t replicate. I hope minimizing our waste disposal could address the problem but I doubt so. One thing would seem to be a promising solution. Forget our present technology and get back to basics. A well done post, Mark.
On March 22, 2010 at 5:49 pm
I have heard of this phenomena in many articles on countless sites, but all I have ever seen is some drawing of where this garbage island is. I have yet to see any photographic evidence of this. I am not saying it is not true, but I have not seen a single thing. I even tried looking on the different satellite imagery sites, and even though the resolution is not great, if there was that much garbage out there, you would be able to see something, I would think. I am a little skeptical.
On March 25, 2010 at 8:29 pm
DooN
This puzzles many people, but the garbage is not a solid mass, and most of it is floating just under the water, some like the nurdles is invisible in the water to cameras.
I did mention earlier in the article that it is not showing up on Satellite because the pieces are not touching and because of so much being just beneath the water surface.