Aloha Analytics: Great Pacific Garbage Patch: "A big animal without a leash"

May 19, 2009

Great Pacific Garbage Patch: "A big animal without a leash"

Swirling Mass of Ocean Trash Grows Bigger Than The U.S.
by Kerry Trueman on February 7, 2008

If the Great Pacific Garbage Patch gets any bigger, we may have to colonize it–that is, if it doesn’t invade us first. This swirling mass of plastic debris was a Texas-sized vortex when I first wrote about it in November. Now, this mass of roughly 100 million tons of garbage has overtaken an “area that is maybe twice the size” of the continental United States, as one researcher who’s studying the vortex told the Independent.

Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a “flotsam” expert, has been trailing the trash vortex for fifteen years and describes it as “a big animal without a leash:”

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.”

The patch of garbage, which has actually expanded into two connecting areas known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches, was first discovered in 1997 by Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who was “taking a short cut home from a Los Angeles to Hawaii yacht race.”

As Moore navigated through the rarely traveled North Pacific gyre, “a vortex where the ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure systems,” he became perplexed that there, thousands of miles from shore, was an endless stream of debris:

“Every time I came on deck, there was trash floating by. How could we have fouled such a huge area? How could this go on for a week?”

The spectacle both galled and galvanized Moore. Heir to an oil industry fortune, he sold his business interests and became an environmental activist, founding the Algalita Marine Research Foundation.

Before the advent of modern plastics, the garbage we dumped in the ocean eventually degraded, but now, “every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere,” as Tony Andrady, a chemist with the Research Triangle Institute, told the Independent.

The UN Environment Programme estimates that in 2006, every square mile of ocean contained 46,000 pieces of floating plastic. This slowly revolving mass of rubbish kills “more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals,” according to the UN Environment Programme.

The plastic poses a health hazard to humans, too, because it acts as a carrier for the chemicals and pesticides that foul the ocean and find their way in to our food chain. Moore warns that this toxic "plastic stew" will double in size over the next decade unless consumers cut back on their use of disposable plastics.