gosblog-eng: Plastic island

A plastic island in the Pacific Ocean: most of us would probably find it unbelievable.

But it's true. We collected some interesting information, that is available online, about this phenomenon.

Take a look at it.

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also described as the Pacific Trash Vortex, is a gyre of marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean located roughly between California and Japan, north-west of Hawaii, where many currents come together to form a giant, clockwise moving area of water.

But how did it form? This huge Garbage Patch formed gradually as a result of marine pollution gathered by oceanic currents. It occupies a large and relatively stationary region of the North Pacific Ocean bound by the North Pacific Gyre. The gyre's rotational pattern draws in waste material from across the ocean. As material is captured in the currents, wind-driven surface currents gradually move floating debris toward the center, trapping it in the region. However, this is not a unique phenomenon: a similar patch of floating plastic debris is found in the Atlantic Ocean, i.e. the North Atlantic Garbage Patch, a newly discovered area of marine debris found floating within the North Atlantic Gyre.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch was discovered in 1997 by oceanographer Charles Moore when he was sailing off Hawaii. “I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic,” Moore said. “In the week it took to cross, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments. Half of it was just little chips that we couldn't identify. It wasn't a revelation so much as a gradual sinking feeling that something was terribly wrong here.” Floating beneath the surface of the water, to a depth of 10 meters, was a multitude of small plastic flecks and particles, in many colors, swirling like snowflakes or fish food. An awful thought occurred to Moore and he started measuring the weight of plastic in the water compared to that of plankton. “Plastic won, and it wasn't even close. We found six times more plastic than plankton, and this was just colossal,” he says. “No one had any idea this was happening, or what it might mean for marine ecosystems, or even where all this stuff was coming from.”

Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, founded by Mr. Moore, 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.”

The size of this rubbish-covered region of ocean is still unknown: some say twice the size of Texas, others twice the size of continental United States... however, knowing how large it is doesn't really matter, what matters is that it's one of the largest man-made environmental disasters in the world and it's getting larger every year!

Greenpeace said that 10% of all plastic manufactured each year ends up in the ocean! Worldwide, according to the United Nations Environment Program, over a million sea-birds and one hundred thousand marine mammals and sea turtles are killed each year by ingestion of plastics or entanglement. Fish and seabirds mistake plastic for food and choke to death.

Various initiatives have been undertaken to study the phenomenon and educate the public on its implications. To draw attention to the phenomenon, the heir to one of the world's greatest fortunes, David de Rothschild, has undertaken an extraordinary venture: he set sail across the Pacific in a 20-meter catamaran, the Plastiki, made from plastic bottles and recycled waste. The voyage aims to highlight a variety of environmental threats, including overfishing and climate change, but the most important part of Plastiki's route is its voyage round the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

David de Rothschild's "Plastiki".

Captain Charles Moore, who founded the Algalita foundation, commands a research vessel, ORV Alguita, that has carried its research team to the most remote regions of the Pacific Ocean to study plastic pollution. Since he discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, he has been passionate about investigating it and creating awareness about its significance, the magnitude of marine pollution and its impact on life.

Plastic does not biodegrade; but it does photodegrade. Prolonged exposure to sunlight causes polymer chains to break down into smaller and smaller pieces. So, except for the small percentage that is incinerated, every single molecule of plastic that has ever been manufactured is still somewhere in the environment, and some 100 million tons of it are floating in the oceans. A dead albatross was found recently with a piece of plastic from the 1940s in its stomach. Even if plastic production halted tomorrow, the planet would be dealing with its environmental consequences for thousands of years, and on the bottom of the oceans, where an estimated 70% of marine plastic debris ends up.

“Plastics, like diamonds, are forever” – Charles Moore