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Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a big, giant trash vortex of tiny bits of plastic known commonly as micro-plastics that people are unable to see with the naked eye but appears through satellite and physically as just a cloudy area much like a soup.

This Patch was first discovered in 1997. Charles Moore, an oceanography and sailboat racer, noticed the “soup” of plastic while sailing on his yacht in the Pacific ocean between the coast of California and Hawaii. It has never been a physical mass but instead many tiny plastic debris throughout the ocean. Large pieces and different kinds of fishing gear make up around 92 percent of the trash inside this patch. There are exactly two  patches, one in the western and one in the eastern. It is considered a floating mass just the size of Texas. This has been a big issue since the late 1980s but it has only become public attention only after 1997.

This patch is created by the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, it is a group of circular currents that tend to draw the trash into the center essentially stabilizing it and trapping it in the current. It is made up of more than just tiny bits of plastic but of a much larger size. Microplastics only accounted for 8 percent of the plastic in the patch. It is also rumored that up to 20 percent could have been swept into the ocean during the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Some 80 percent of the plastics come from the land and it has taken years for it to travel from the coasts. Some of the trash is over 10 years old.

This garbage patch contains around 79,000 metric tons of trash. This would make it 16 times larger than previously estimated in previous years. A team of oceanographers wanted to get a handle on what's in the patch and to figure out how large it is by commissioning a team to do a great study of the patch. The Ocean Cleanup team used over 30 boats to survey the patch. A team found that the patch contains 1.8 trillion pieces of debris floating throughout the patch. The dimensions and depths of the patch are continuously changing throughout time.

There is a great effect on marine life and is killing them. 1 million seabirds and 10,000 marine mammals are affected every year as well as other species. It presents many hazards to marine life, fishing and tourism. Plastic doesn’t biodegrade so there is no natural process that is able to break this down. The tiny particles of plastic can get sucked up or eaten by marine animals which can poison them or lead to deadly consequences. It can also be very toxic and over time it can threaten the entire food chain. This plastic also damages boats, litter beaches, and harm commercial and local fisheries. Some beaches are buried under five to 10 feet of trash while some are now considered plastic sand. The 19 islands of the Hawaiian archipelago receive many quantities of trash shot out from the currents.

There is not much anyone is able to do about this problem because it would be no easy task to take on. Even trying to clean up microplastics is very difficult and quite nearly impossible but fishing out the bigger debris might be feasible but still not the easiest task. Many different communities have tried to take small actions to fix this problem such as eliminating the use of plastic bags and bringing volunteers to the beaches and coasts to pick up trash. But even with all this there are still several hundreds layers of trash several feet thick in the sand and water. Scientists have figured out that trying to rid the ocean of all its trash would harm plankton and other marine life. It is simply impossible to clear a section where the trash extends 100 feet below the surface.

National Geographic Society. “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” National Geographic Society, 9 Oct. 2012, www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/great-pacific-garbage-patch/.

Daley, Jason. “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Is Much Larger and Chunkier Than We Thought.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 23 Mar. 2018, www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/great-pacific-garbage-patch-larger-and-chunkier-we-thought-180968580/.

Silverman, Jacob. “Why Is the World's Biggest Landfill in the Pacific Ocean?” HowStuffWorks Science, HowStuffWorks, 30 June 2020, science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/oceanography/great-pacific-garbage-patch.htm.

“How We Can Destroy the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?” WWF, www.wwf.org.au/news/blogs/how-can-we-destroy-the-great-pacific-garbage-patch.

Dianna.parker. “Garbage Patches: OR&R's Marine Debris Program.” Dianna.parker, 11 July 2013, marinedebris.noaa.gov/info/patch.html.

“Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 13 Nov. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch.