Earth's Eighth Continent: A Massive Floating Garbage Patch

http://thetyee.ca/News/2007/11/21/PacificGarbagePatch/">Earth's Eighth Continent

North Pacific Gyre traps flotsam.
It swirls. It grows. It's a massive, floating 'garbage patch.'

By David Reid
Published: November 21, 2007

The Phoenix

Located in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii and measuring in at roughly twice the size of Texas, this elusive mass is home to hundreds of species of marine life and is constantly expanding. It has tripled in size since the middle of the 1990s and could grow tenfold in the next decade.

Although no official title has been given to the mass yet, a popular label thus far has been "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch."

As suggested by the name, the island is almost entirely comprises human-made trash. It currently weighs approximately 3.5 million tons with a concentration of 3.34 million pieces of garbage per square kilometer, 80 per cent of which is plastic.

Due to the Patch's location in the North Pacific Gyre, its growth is guaranteed to continue as this Africa-sized section of ocean spins in a vortex that effectively traps flotsam....

Friday, October 19, 2007

The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

Marcus Eriksen, director of research and education at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, said his group has been monitoring the Garbage Patch for 10 years.

"With the winds blowing in and the currents in the gyre going circular, it's the perfect environment for trapping," Eriksen said. "There's nothing we can do about it now, except do no more harm."

The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s, said Chris Parry, public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco.

Some sources have incorrectly reported that there is a "floating continent" of debris that is roughly twice the size of Texas, however no scientific investigation, including Moore's, has verified this.

Occasionally, shifts in the ocean currents release flotsam lost from cargo ships into the currents around the North Pacific Gyre, leading to predictable patterns of garbage washing up on the shores around the outskirts of the gyre. The most famous was the loss of approximately 80,000 Nike sneakers and boots from the ship Hansa Carrier in 1990: the currents of the gyre distributed the shoes around the shores of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and Hawaii over the following three years. Similar cargo spills have involved tens of thousands of bathtub toys in 1992 and hockey equipment in 1994...

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While the trash is in the ocean, it is doing what could be irreparable harm to sea life, the water it's in, and eventually humans.
Plastic resists biodegrading. Instead, a plastic shopping bag or pop bottle will photo-degrade over time, meaning that it will break down into smaller and smaller pieces but retain its original molecular composition.

The result is a great amount of fine plastic sand that resembles food to many creatures.
Unfortunately, the plastic cannot be digested, so sea birds or fish can eventually starve to death with a stomach full of plastic.
Even if the amount of plastic in a creature's body is not enough to block the passage of food, the small pellets act as sponges for several toxins, concentrating chemicals such as DDT to 1 million times the normal level.
This concentration then works its way up the food chain until a fish is served at our dinner table.

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In total, 267 species have been reported to have eaten from, or become entangled in, the Patch.

According to Chris Parry of the California Coastal Commission, regrettably little can be done to clean up the Patch, although many urge that a decreased reliance on plastic is the first step.
"At this point," said Parry, "cleaning it up isn't an option . . . it's just going to get bigger as our reliance on plastics continues."
"The long-term solution is to stop producing as much plastic products at home and change our consumption habits."

Cleaning up the Patch will likely cost billions of dollars and, as an approximation, be more difficult than vacuuming every inch of the United States. The plastic and garbage reach more than 30 metres down into the ocean and a great number of organisms would be destroyed in the process.
So far, no country has so much as proposed a solution, presumably because no nation wishes to claim responsibility.
Even if all plastic usage were to stop immediately, future geologists would be able to clearly mark the stratum designating the 20th and 21st century by an indelible layer of plastic coating the world's oceans.