"The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of
plastic."
- Curtis Ebbesmeyer -
The world's largest rubbish dump - covering an area twice the size of the continental United States - is afloat across the Pacific Ocean. This plastic soup of debris stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan. In the American oceanographer Charles Moore's - who discovered the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" - guesstimation about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region!
The Alguita Marine Research team had set out to investigate for a month in 2008 just how much plastic waste was floating in the ocean, how this plastic affected marine life, and how this might affect humans that eat fish found in the area known as the North Pacific Gyre. They discovered that a soup of plastic debris was afloat in the Pacific Ocean and was increasing at an alarming rate. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said: "The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States"- to quote from the article 'The world's rubbish dump: a tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan' by Kathy Marks with Daniel Howden for The Independent-Green Living.
It was a chance encounter for sailor Marcus Eriksen in 1997 when he had steered his craft into the "North Pacific gyre" – a vortex where the ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure systems. Usually sailors avoid it. He was taken aback that so much rubbish surrounded his craft day in and day out thousands of miles off land. This vast expanse of plastic flotsam is held in place by the swirling underwater currents that it is also referred to as 'trash vortex.' The "soup" is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk – which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags – is thrown off ships or oil platforms.The rest comes from land, wrote Kathy Marks and Daniel Howden.
"It moves around like a big animal without a leash," claimed oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer - an authority on oceanic flotsam.When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. "The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic," he added with eloquence. To boot, Research Triangle Institute (US) chemist Tony Andrady pointed out: "Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere."
plastic."
- Curtis Ebbesmeyer -
The world's largest rubbish dump - covering an area twice the size of the continental United States - is afloat across the Pacific Ocean. This plastic soup of debris stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan. In the American oceanographer Charles Moore's - who discovered the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" - guesstimation about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region!
The Alguita Marine Research team had set out to investigate for a month in 2008 just how much plastic waste was floating in the ocean, how this plastic affected marine life, and how this might affect humans that eat fish found in the area known as the North Pacific Gyre. They discovered that a soup of plastic debris was afloat in the Pacific Ocean and was increasing at an alarming rate. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said: "The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States"- to quote from the article 'The world's rubbish dump: a tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan' by Kathy Marks with Daniel Howden for The Independent-Green Living.
It was a chance encounter for sailor Marcus Eriksen in 1997 when he had steered his craft into the "North Pacific gyre" – a vortex where the ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure systems. Usually sailors avoid it. He was taken aback that so much rubbish surrounded his craft day in and day out thousands of miles off land. This vast expanse of plastic flotsam is held in place by the swirling underwater currents that it is also referred to as 'trash vortex.' The "soup" is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk – which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags – is thrown off ships or oil platforms.The rest comes from land, wrote Kathy Marks and Daniel Howden.
"It moves around like a big animal without a leash," claimed oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer - an authority on oceanic flotsam.When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. "The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic," he added with eloquence. To boot, Research Triangle Institute (US) chemist Tony Andrady pointed out: "Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere."
The UN Environment Programme reveals that plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals! Syringes, cigarette lighters and toothbrushes have been found inside the stomachs of dead seabirds, which mistake them for food. Plastic is believed to constitute 90 per cent of all rubbish floating in the oceans. The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic! Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets, or nurdles – the raw materials for the plastic industry – are lost or spilled every year, working their way into the sea. These pollutants act as chemical sponges attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. They then enter the food chain. "What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It's that simple," said Dr Eriksen.
In the ocean, "Degraded plastic pieces outweigh surface zooplankton in the central North Pacific by a factor of 6-1. That means six pounds of plastic for every single pound of zooplankton" informs past studies. The need to obtain "a full accounting of the distribution of plastic in the marine ecosystem and especially its fate and impact on marine ecosystems," as called for by oceanographer David Karl at the University of Hawaii the sea of rubbish is all the more urgent considering that the 'rubbish' is translucent and lies just below the water's surface consequently not detectable in satellite photographs./
tXtrEf: The world's rubbish dump: a tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan by
Kathy Marks and Daniel Howden in The Independent-Green Living, 2008./
Environment News Network story on the topic.2008.
Kathy Marks and Daniel Howden in The Independent-Green Living, 2008./
Environment News Network story on the topic.2008.
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