by Jenaka

Created on: September 04, 2008

Our Oceans The toilet that never flushes

Captain Charles Moore got more of an eye full then he ever wanted to see. In August of 1997 he returned home from Hawaii, to Southern California and decided to make a detour through an odd piece of ocean most sailboat captains try to avoid. His route would lead him through a corner of the North Pacific subtropical gyre, some 800 miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. The gyre is a 10-million square mile oval that most top predator fish also avoid. The waters are a clockwise swirling vortex, created by the high-pressure air residing above it. To pacific Sailors it is known as the "doldrums" and they try to stay as far away from it as possible.

Captain Moore had time on his hands and was in the mood to explore. What he found changed his life forever.

At first it was a long line of plastic bags that swirled slowly by his boat, soon that was followed by what seemed to Moore like a Landfill: nets, ropes, bottles, a tire, motor oil jugs, broken bath toys all wrapped in the tatters of a mangled tarp guarded by a traffic cone and on and on. The waters were a stew of plastic that never ended. The junk just went on and on. Moore could not believe his eyes and stunned he followed the trash for a week.. He found himself in a purgatory of circling, bobbing and toxic debris. The trail of garbage went on for hundreds of miles and there was no end to it.

Scientists refer to this as the "Eastern Garbage Patch" and it has some far reaching implications for humans: it is a major factor in our survival and in the planetary health.

Beginning on that day, Moore became active in the Marine Health world. He created the Algalita Marine Research Foundation and he's been on a mission since. The mission to learn what exactly is going on in his beloved ocean and how this could be stopped from happening. He enlisted Steven B. Weisberg, an scientist and the executive director of the Southern Coastal Waters Project; Weisberg is also an expert in marine environmental monitoring and together they diligently developed methods to analyze the gyre's content.
Moore sailed back to the Garbage Patch several times and found that the volume of plastic increased every time he gets there. The patch is now twice the size of Texas.

Their research soon was showing that this big ball of trash was only a small part of the problem. The minuscules pieces of plastic they dragged out of the waters with a manta drawl, some of them so small they could barely be seen with out

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