My Eco Action

Are you aware that in the Pacific Ocean there is a massive, well, mass of floating plastic and other debris. It’s located in the northwest part of the Pacific Ocean, approximately a thousand miles off the coast of California.

It’s been dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and it makes up perhaps thousands of miles of open ocean. Gross right? Researchers are cracking down on it and trying to find out where all this garbage is coming from and why it is gathering there in such quantity.

Now researchers are trying to learn more about the sea-bound trash zone and perhaps find answers to basic questions. The crew on the job is a group of scientists from the University of California’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and they plan to spend 3 weeks studying the debris field.

“There may be a misapprehension … that if you got out there and stood on the middle of a deck you’d see nothing but plastic litter from horizon to horizon,” said Robert Knox, deputy director for research at the Scripps Institution.

“It’s relatively sparse, and you might or might not see something visible to the human eye at any particular location out there,” Knox says. “Certainly one does encounter pieces of plastic stuff that are big enough to see. But the other side of the puzzle is all the little bits and pieces of plastic that you can’t even see unless you scoop up a sample of seawater and see what’s in there.”

“I think it’s a little misleading to think of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as a great big island that you could practically get out and walk on, but the point is it’s a big area of ocean. So even a few pieces of plastic per square meter amounts to a lot of plastic when you add it up over this enormous ocean area.”

The information this new group of scientists are looking for are vital to combating the problem and making sure this kind of thing can be avoided in the future. Here are some of the answers they are seeking concerning the garbage patch:

1) How much garbage is there?
2) How big is the debris in the area?
3) What is the majority of the debris made of?
4) How deep does the garbage go, is it just on the surface?
5) How does all of this thrown away plastic and other material affect the food chain?

They are pretty sure that the vast majority of the garbage in the area is made up of different types of plastic and they want to know how that is affecting the marine life as well as birds etc. etc. who feed in the area.

While there are many facts they don’t yet know about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch there are some things they do know:

The size of this zone is massive, perhaps as big as Texas. They are also pretty sure that the plastic began it’s journey in the ocean as bigger pieces but over time has been broken down into small bits like confetti that is most likely sitting just under the surface like so many bits of confetti. Just think, thousands of miles of shredded plastic bits that fish and birds are ingesting as we speak.

While other oceans, rivers and seas have debris fields of their own, at this time it seems as though the Pacific Patch is the largest by far. Rusty Brainard with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration believes that this debris field contains not only plastic but also huge masses of fishing nets, which destroys ecosystems around the Hawaiian Islands.

What makes plastic so deadly is that as it breaks down and degrades it becomes smaller and smaller bits of poison that seabirds mistake it for food. They then dive down and eat it.

Brainard says they’ve found many, many skeletons of seabirds on the Islands and “their gut content is just filled with plastic.” How many other animals are eating plastic? Birds eat it, something else eats the bird which in turn is eaten by something else until these toxins finally find their way into our own diet.

Scary thought.

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