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A little-known island continent of floating toxic plastic garbage, TWICE the size of Texas, is growing in the pacific between California and Hawaii. Officially known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, until it can be taxed, U.S. officials will continue to ignore it. I heard of it once many years ago, but it apparently has been growing tenfold each decade since the 1950's, and now consists of 80% plastic. It has also been called Gilligan's Island, from the trashy TV sitcom that won't go away."

The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

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The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s, said Chris Parry, public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco.

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The potential for ingestion of plastic particles by open ocean filter feeders was assessed by measuring the relative abundance and mass of neustonic plastic and zooplankton near the central high-pressure area of the North Pacific central gyre. Neuston samples were collected at 11 random sites, using a manta trawl lined with 333 u mesh. The abundance and mass of neustonic plastic was the largest recorded in this area at 334,271 pieces/km' and 5,114 g/km2, respectively. Plankton abundance was approximately five times higher than that of plastic, but the mass of plastic was approximately six times that of plankton. The most frequently sampled types of identifiable plastic were thin films and polypropylene/monofilament line. The most frequently sampled type of unidentified plastic was plastic fragments. Cumulatively, these three types accounted for 98% of the total plastic pieces.

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Marine debris is a visible expression of human impact on the marine environment. Debris is more than an aesthetic problem, posing a danger to marine organisms through ingestion and entanglement (Day 1980, Balazs 1985, Fowler 1987, Ryan 1987, Robards 1993, Bjorndal et al. 1994, Laist 1997). The number of marine mammals that die each year due to ingestion and entanglement approaches 100,000 in the North Pacific Ocean alone (Wallace 1985). Worldwide, 82 of 144 bird species examined contained small debris in their stomachs, and in many species the incidence of ingestion exceeds 80% of the individuals (Ryan 1990).

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It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments. Months later, after I discussed what I had seen with the oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, perhaps the world's leading expert on flotsam, he began referring to the area as the "eastern garbage patch." But "patch" doesn't begin to convey the reality. Ebbesmeyer has estimated that the area, nearly covered with floating plastic debris, is roughly the size of Texas.



My interest in marine debris did not begin with my crossing of the North Pacific subtropical gyre. Voyaging in the Pacific has been part of my life since earliest childhood. In fifty-odd years as a deckhand, stock tender, able seaman, and now captain, I became increasingly alarmed by the growth in plastic debris I was seeing. But the floating plastics in the gyre galvanized my interest.

I did a quick calculation, estimating the debris at half a pound for every hundred square meters of sea surface. Multiplied by the circular area defined by

our roughly thousand-mile course through the gyre, the weight of the debris was about 3 million tons, comparable to a year's deposition at Puente Hills, Los Angeles's largest landfill. I resolved to return someday to test my alarming estimate.

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In 2001, in the Marine Pollution Bulletin, we published the results of our survey and the analysis we had made of the debris, reporting, among other things, that there are six pounds of plastic floating in the North Pacific subtropical gyre for every pound of naturally occurring zooplankton. Our readers were as shocked as we were when we saw the yield of our first trawl. Since then we have returned to the area twice to continue documenting the phenomenon. During the latest trip, in the summer of 2002, our photographers captured underwater images of jellyfish hopelessly entangled in frayed lines, and transparent filter feeding organisms with colored plastic fragments in their bellies.

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Entanglement and indigestion, however, are not the worst problems caused by the ubiquitous plastic pollution. Hideshige Takada, an environmental geochemist at Tokyo University, and his colleagues have discovered that floating plastic fragments accumulate hydrophobic-that is, non-water-soluble-toxic chemicals. Plastic polymers, it turns out, are sponges for DDT, PCBs, and other oily pollutants. The Japanese investigators found that plastic resin pellets concentrate such poisons to levels as high as a million times their concentrations in the water as free-floating substances.

The potential scope of the problem is staggering. Every year some 5.5 quadrillion (5.5 x 1015) plastic pellets—about 250 billion pounds of them—are produced worldwide for use in the manufacture of plastic products. When those pellets or products degrade, break into fragments, and disperse, the pieces may also become concentrators and transporters of toxic chemicals in the marine environment. Thus an astronomical number of vectors for some of the most toxic pollutants known are being released into an ecosystem dominated by the most efficient natural vacuum cleaners nature ever invented: the jellies and salps living in the ocean. After those organisms ingest the toxins, they are eaten in turn by fish, and so the poisons pass into the food web that leads, in some cases, to human beings. Farmers can grow pesticide-free organic produce, but can nature still produce a pollutant-free organic fish? After what I have seen first hand in the Pacific, I have my doubts.

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The subtropical gyres of the world are part of the deep ocean realm, whose ability to absorb, hide, and recycle refuse has long been seen as limitless. That ecologically sound image, however, was born in an era devoid of petroleumbased plastic polymers. Yet the many benefits of modern society's productivity have made nearly all of us hopelessly, and to a large degree rationally, addicted to plastic. Many, if not most, of the products we use daily contain or are contained by plastic. Plastic wraps, packaging, and even clothing defeat air and moisture and so defeat bacterial and oxidative decay. Plastic is ubiquitous precisely because it is so good at preventing nature from robbing us of our hardearned goods through incessant decay.

But the plastic polymers commonly used in consumer products, even as single molecules of plastic, are indigestible by any known organism. Even those single molecules must be further degraded by sunlight or slow oxidative breakdown before their constituents can be recycled into the building blocks of life. There is no data on how long such recycling takes in the ocean-some ecologists have made estimates of 500 years or more. Even more ominously, no one knows the ultimate consequences of the worldwide dispersion of plastic fragments that can concentrate the toxic chemicals already present in the world's oceans.

Ironically, the debris is re-entering the oceans whence it came; the ancient plankton that once floated on Earth's primordial sea gave rise to the petroleum now being transformed into plastic polymers. That exhumed life, our "civilized plankton," is, in effect, competing with its natural counterparts, as well as with those life-forms that directly or indirectly feed on them.

And the scale of the phenomenon is astounding. I now believe plastic debris to be the most common surface feature of the world's oceans. Because 40 percent of the oceans are classified as subtropical gyres, a fourth of the planet's surface area has become an accumulator of floating plastic debris. What can be done with this new class of products made specifically to defeat natural recycling? How can the dictum "In ecosystems, everything is used" be made to work with plastic?

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For several years ocean researcher Charles Moore has been investigating a concentration of floating plastic debris in the North Pacific Gyre. He has reported concentrations of plastics on the order of 3,340,000 pieces/km² with a mean mass of 5.1kg/km² collected using a manta trawl with a rectangular opening of 0.9m x 0.15m at the surface. Trawls at depths of 10m found less than half, consisting primarily of monofilament line fouled with diatoms and other plankton.[3]

Estimates of the size of the patch varies from the size of Texas[4] to twice as large as the continental United States.[5] Researcher Dr. Marcus Eriksen believes the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is two areas of rubbish that are linked. Eriksen says the gyre stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the coast of California, across the Northern Pacific to near the coast of Japan[6].

The Independent newspaper stated that Moore estimates there are 100 million tons of flotsam in the North Pacific Gyre.[7]


Much of the plastic is in very small pieces floating under the surface of the water, meaning capturing a photograph of the patch is not possible. Because the garbage is so small and scattered, clean-up is also incredibly difficult, without endangering sea life.[8]

One of the first researchers to study the Pacific gyre was oceanographer W. James Ingraham Jr. He developed the Ocean Surface Current Simulator (OSCURS) and predicts that objects trapped in the gyre may remain trapped there for sixteen years or more.[2]

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ToiletDuk said:
Damn, that's kinda scary.

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Much of the plastic is in very small pieces floating under the surface of the water, meaning capturing a photograph of the patch is not possible.

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suimush said:

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ToiletDuk said:
Damn, that's kinda scary.

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KINDA scary!  KINDA!!!!!!! are you fucking insane!

Understatement of the century.

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Shroomism said:
Pretty fucked up. What can we do about it?

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