by Kallie Szczepanski

Created on: January 22, 2008

On August 3, 1997, Captain Charles Moore of Long Beach, California was sailing home out of Honolulu. He decided to steer his aluminum-hulled catamaran a bit north of his usual route, into what is known as the "horse latitudes" or the "doldrums." This is an area where the wind is unreliable, and the water whirls slowly in a clockwise direction with a high-pressure sink in the middle, driven by the Coriolis Effect. Oceanographers call this the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. Others call it the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and Captain Moore soon saw why.

His catamaran's bow crunched through the water like an ice-breaker, parting bergs not of ice, but of floating plastic. The sea was a soup of bottle caps, plastic wrap, six-pack rings, balloons, cups, fishing nets, milk jugs, and bath toys. Flip-flops lost at the beach, a traffic cone swept down the gutter and out to sea. For an entire week, Moore and his crew sailed through this plastic desert, traveling about 1000 miles and seeing nothing but trash. In total area, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was as large as the state of Texas... in 1997. Now, more than a decade later, it's nearly as big as all of Africa.

Where does this hideous mess come from, and how does it end up out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? Moore started to research these questions as soon as he got back to the mainland, and found out that although seagoing ships dump 8 million pounds of plastic per year, that's just a drop in this ocean of trash. The world produces an unimaginable 60 billion tons of plastic objects each year. Where does all this plastic go, once it's been used? Often, it goes out to sea. 80% of the rubbish in the gyre was discarded on land. It dumped out of shipping containers, fell off of garbage trucks, was wafted from landfills, or washed down storm drains, and ended up here, in a slowly turning sea coated with plastic.

Plastics have some remarkable properties. They are sturdy, and often very difficult to break. Plastic floats well in water, and light-weight plastics such as shopping bags and balloons can sail hundreds of miles on the wind. Plastic does eventually photodegrade, meaning that ultraviolet rays from the sun break it into smaller pieces, but it never biodegrades-nothing can digest plastic. Just like diamonds, plastic is forever.

In 1998, Moore sailed back out to the Gyre with a fine-mesh trawling device usually used for sampling krill and other small organisms. He towed it behind his ship, and found an incredible

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>